Full house : the spread of excellence from Plato to Darwin

Few would question the truism that humankind is the crowning achievement of evolution; that the defining thrust of life's history yields progress over time from the primitive and simple to the more advanced and complex; that the disappearance of .400 hitting in baseball is a fact to be bemoaned; or that identifying an existing trend can be helpful in making important life decisions. Few, that is, except Stephen Jay Gould who, in his new book Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, proves that all of these intuitive truths are, in fact, wrong. "All of these mistaken beliefs arise out of the same analytical flaw in our reasoning, our Platonic tendency to reduce a broad spectrum to a single, pinpointed essence," says Gould. "This way of thinking allows us to confirm our most ingrained biases that humans are the supreme being on this planet; that all things are inherently driven to become more complex; and that almost any subject can be expressed and understood in terms of an average." In Full House, Gould shows why a more accurate way of understanding our world (and the history of life) is to look at a given subject within its own context, to see it as a part of a spectrum of variation rather than as an isolated "thing" and then to reconceptualize trends as expansion or contraction of this "full house" of variation, and not as the progress or degeneration of an average value, or single thing. When approached in such a way, the disappearance of .400 hitting becomes a cause for celebration, signaling not a decline in greatness but instead an improvement in the overall level of play in baseball; trends become subject to suspicion, and too often, only a tool of those seeking to advance a particular agenda; and the "Age of Man" (a claim rooted in hubris, not in fact) more accurately becomes the "Age of Bacteria." "The traditional mode of thinking has led us to draw many conclusions that don't make satisfying sense," says Gould. "It tells us that .400 hitting has disappeared because batters have gotten worse, but how can that be true when record performances have improved in almost any athletic activity?" In a personal eureka!, Gould realized that we were looking at the picture backward, and that a simple conceptual inversion would resolve a number of the paradoxes of the conventional view. While Full House deftly reveals the shortcomings of the popular reasoning we apply to everyday life situations, Gould also explores his beloved realm of natural history as well. Whether debunking the myth of the successful evolution of the horse (he grants that the story still deserves distinction, but as the icon of evolutionary failure); presenting evidence that the vaunted "progress of life" is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward complexity; or relegating the kingdoms of Animalai and Plantae to their proper positions on the genealogical chart for all of life (as mere twigs on one of the three bushes), Full House asks nothing less than that we reconceptualize our view of life in a fundamental way. From the Hardcover edition. Front Cover......Page 1 Title Page......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Dedication......Page 8 Contents ......Page 10 A Modest Proposal ......Page 14 Part One: How Shall we Read and Spot a Trend? ......Page 18 1. A Huxley's Chessboard ......Page 20 2. Darwins Amidst the Spin Doctors ......Page 30 3. Different Parsings, Different Images of Trends ......Page 43 Part Two: Death and Horses: Two Cases for the Primacy of Variation ......Page 56 4. Case One: A Personal Story......Page 58 5. Case Two: Life's Little Joke......Page 70 Part Three: The Model Batter: Extinction of 0.400 Hitting and the Improvement of Baseball......Page 88 6. Stating the Problem ......Page 90 7. Conventional Explanations ......Page 93 8. A Plausibility Argument for General Improvement......Page 102 9. 0.400 Hitting Dies as the Right Tail Shrinks......Page 111 10. Why the Death of 0.400 Hitting Records Improvement of Play......Page 124 11. A Philosophical Conclusion......Page 142 Part Four: The Modal Bacter: Why Progress Does not Rule the History of Life......Page 146 12. The Bare bones of Natural Selection ......Page 148 13. A Preliminary Example at Smallest Scale, with Some Generalities on the Evolution of Body Size ......Page 160 14. The Power of the Modal Bacter, or Why the tail Can't Wag the Dog ......Page 180 15. An Epilog on Human Culture ......Page 230 Bibliography ......Page 244 Index......Page 251 Front Cover 1 Title Page 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 8 Contents 10 A Modest Proposal 14 Part One: How Shall we Read and Spot a Trend? 18 1. A Huxley's Chessboard 20 2. Darwins Amidst the Spin Doctors 30 3. Different Parsings, Different Images of Trends 43 Part Two: Death and Horses: Two Cases for the Primacy of Variation 56 4. Case One: A Personal Story 58 5. Case Two: Life's Little Joke 70 Part Three: The Model Batter: Extinction of 0.400 Hitting and the Improvement of Baseball 88 6. Stating the Problem 90 7. Conventional Explanations 93 8. A Plausibility Argument for General Improvement 102 9. 0.400 Hitting Dies as the Right Tail Shrinks 111 10. Why the Death of 0.400 Hitting Records Improvement of Play 124 11. A Philosophical Conclusion 142 Part Four: The Modal Bacter: Why Progress Does not Rule the History of Life 146 12. The Bare bones of Natural Selection 148 13. A Preliminary Example at Smallest Scale, with Some Generalities on the Evolution of Body Size 160 14. The Power of the Modal Bacter, or Why the tail Can't Wag the Dog 180 15. An Epilog on Human Culture 230 Bibliography 244 Index 251 0674061616,9780674061613 Belknap Press of Harvard University Press In Full House, Gould corrects the prevalent, anthropocentric view of the world with an eloquent argument for a new paradigm of progress in which variety - not complexity - is the true measure of excellence. In the process, Full House teaches us how to read trends as changes in variation within full systems, rather than as "things moving somehwere".