Full House: The Spread Of Excellence From Plato To Darwin

Description for FULL HOUSE: THE SPREAD OF EXCELLENCE FROM PLATO TO DARWIN by Stephen Jay Gould:

In his first single-subject book of original writing since the New York Times best-seller WONDERFUL LIFE, Stephen Jay Gould explodes our misperceptions about the nature of progress, the nature of excellence, and the nature of nature.

With more than fifteen books in print, Stephen Jay Gould is the dean of contemporary popular science writers. In this iconoclastic but rigorously presented book, Dr. Gould demonstrates with his characteristic passionate humanism and rational clarity that, contrary to popular opinion, progress and increasing complexity are not characteristic of the evolution of life on Earth.

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 withing full systems, rather than as "things moving somewhere." To illustrate this theme, Gould discusses seemingly disparate topics such as a drunkard's walk along a sidewalk, the disappearance of a 0.400 hitting in baseball, the absence of modern Mozarts, the evolution of the horse, and the continuing dominance of bacterial life on the planet. FULL HOUSE shapes a unified, reasonable picture of nature, history, and life that is often at odds wit what we intuitively "know" to be true.

A major scientific statement from a leading evolutionary scientist, FULL HOUSE, in its boldest claim, asks us to reconceptualize our view of natural reality in a fundamental way. Just as a full house in poker expresses an excellence of all parts together, fortuitous in origin but shaped by selection, this FULL HOUSE argues that variation is the ultimate reality of excellence. As in all of Stephen Jay Gould's writings, he supports his teaching and main arguments with an abundance of biological and paleontological marvels, anecdotes, and arcana---nothing less than Charles Darwin's vision of "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful." Gould celebrates the true nature of excellence of life on Earth as demonstrated by the fullness and constancy of its variety, ingenuity, and diversity.