Customer Reviews

Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

After seeing that there were already some 40 or so reviews of this wonderful book, and having read it some years ago I was reluctant to add another. But, being a fan of Gould's magnificent "Wonderful Life" (1989) and seeing some negative, and misleading reviews of this particular book, I had to chime in. To begin with, Gould's books are highly readable and enjoyable as he has a great capacity to relate objective science to the subjective world. "Full House" will be challenging to you if you do not already understand or buy into Darwinism. If not, you'll definitely take issue with his seemingly harsh conclusions (i.e. "Humans are here by the luck of the draw, not the inevitability of life's direction or evolution's mechanism" p.175). The book is about diversity and "the spread of excellence" on earth. Consequently, it puts man in his place (just another organism amongst many, and quite minor compared to bacteria) amongst greater geologic history; and this can be a bit difficult to swallow at first. But read on!

Utilizing baseball and the disappearance of .400 ave. hitting as one major example to illustrate the nature of evolution, Gould shows through statistics how one aspect of the game (hitting) has declined over time, while the rest (pitching & fielding) have increased in skill level. It all makes perfect sense. That's not to say one can't argue with him (although he's now dead), but Gould's contributions to evolutionary theory can be controversial to the unconverted - especially the religious (namely, Catholics & those with firmly held, comfortable beliefs in Manifest Desitiny). Gould (and most science) is directly opposed to this type of anthropocentric thinking; but not, however, traditional Deist beliefs in which God does not interfere with human evolution. In many regards, "Wonderful Life" and "Full House" comfortably fit into an older, more original Christianity - that of Gnosticism, in which the earth is a sort of abandoned proving ground. Gould conjectures: "...perhaps we are, whatever our glories and accomplishments, a momentary cosmic accident that would never rise again if the tree of life could be replanted from seed and regrown under similar conditions" p.18.

The premiss of "Full House" is that "progress is, nonetheless, a delusion based on social prejudice and psychological hope engendered by our unwillingness to accept the plain (and true) meaning of the fourth Freudian revolution" p.20. Later on, Gould reiterates: "The vaunted progress of life is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward inherently advantageous complexity" p.173. He could be wrong. He could be right. He does however back up his ideas with plenty of observable proofs, experience (he was a paleontologist), and statistics - all in Gould's entertaining and thought-provoking signature style. The fact is, neither Gould nor Darwin nor Freud is saying a person ought to stop striving for excellence - in fact, they're encouraging it! Reading a book like "Full House", or "Wonderful Life" is challenging to many commonly held assumptions about human life, and thus, potentially upsetting, but ultimately uplifting in my view. One optimistic conclusion that may be drawn from this seemingly dismal and dry evolutionary theory is that our life is a unique, wonderful opportunity unparalleled, and definitely not the norm of things.

If the above quotes from the book sound intriguing to you, and you're craving more information, then I highly recommend you try both "Full House" and it's paradigm shifting predecessor, "Wonderful Life". I guarantee that you'll come away with a mind more open, and thoughtful about evolution and life than ever before. Happy reading!

Having been buried by statistics courses in college, it has always amazed me how people build entire empires out of the slimmest of statistical information. Making judgments based purely on an 'mean' response is an invitation to the error of thinking that a change in average means a trend is developing, or that you are even likely to get an average response in any particular case. To be able to make an even educated guess one has to look at the mode, the median, and various statistical distributions. Even then, it's possible to be wrong, but at least you will have an excuse.

This book by the late Stephen Gould is one of the best discussions of statistical fallacy I've ever seen. Gould starts out with the story of is confrontation with a form of cancer that is almost invariably fatal within a very short time period. Or rather, the modal life span after diagnosis is very short. Gould was a survivor, and his discussion of how the mode has very little to do with individual cases, and how that the studies are skewed by being left limited (there are no negative life expectancies) is enlightening.

Having made his initial point, Gould elaborates it by turning to the disappearance of the .400 batting average. Because there is a lot more information about baseball than there is about a rare form of cancer, Gould is able to look at another form of statistical skew, where there may very well be an upper physical limit, and the field involves multiple variables (pitching, hitting, etc.). By the time he is done the reader will be confident that batting is doing fine, and ready for the real reason Gould wrote Full House - just who really is the boss of earth.

From Victorian times onward one of the 'myths' we humans tell each other is that we are somehow the apex of evolution. That not only is progress (as expressed by intelligence and complexity) inevitable, but that it actually is progress. Using the same statistics that analyzed the .400 average, Gould explodes many of the misunderstandings about what evolution actually is. We are reminded that humans, in fact, all of the 'animal kingdom' are the tiniest part of life on the earth. The creatures with the most species, best ability to survive, and sheer numbers and weight, are the lowly bacteria. For some 3.4 billion years they have ruled the earth, and everything else has been their food.

On top of finding out that we may very well be the last representatives of a dying genera, we must suffer with the fact that we have been beaten out by the most elementary of life forms. Gould reminds us that 'It is a gift to be simple,' writing in a style that is both entertaining and easily accessible. You may start out statistically disadvantaged, but by the end of 'Full House' you will have a much clearer picture of statistics and evolution. While Gould does not break any new territory in this book, he does take us on a wonderful tour of the real world.

I like Gould's style. He is a scientist and not a philosopher. So many other books of this type present purely philosophical, or even worse religious, arguments which have nothing to do with reality (you can "prove" anything with pure logic if you make the correct initial assumptions). This sort of pap is an insult the reader's intelligence. Stephen Gould makes a compelling and logical argument which is supported by empirical evidence and not assumptions. Before reading this book I accepted the popular myth that evolution tends to produce complexity. This book has reduced my ignorance.

I thought the link between baseball and evolution was clever. Gould is a master at finding connections between seemingly disparate subjects. I

I had read a lot about Stephen Jay Gould, but had only read some of his essays, and never one of his book-length works, before a few weeks ago I noticed a copy of Full House at a sale of old stock from the local central library. The press on Gould has been particularly voluminous this year, after he died in May, aged 60, to the cancer he had evaded earlier in his life -- and so he had been higher on my list (you know, the list, the neverending, constantly shifting ranked order of titles of works you want to read, most of which are destined to remain keys to unexplored worlds at your own death). Finding the book was particularly fortuitous for me, however, since one of the big problems I have been wrestling with during the year has been why evolution should drive towards complexity; and I didn't even know, buying Full House, that this was the central question it addresses. As soon as I started, I realised how lucky the find was, and felt straight away that I was talking one-on-one with Gould about the problem; at every stage, he would anticipate my questions with his answers, as if I had been whispering doubts in his ear as he composed it. The book is really quite a bit longer than it needs to be to answer the question, in the end -- and it isn't long, a well-spaced 230 pages, with illustrations. The solution, in the grand theme of intellectual revolutions, is actually a dissolution -- an argument that it is a mistake to see evolution as driving anywhere at all. Complexity turns out to be something that results given enough free play in a randomly varying system, rather than a pre-ordained endpoint towards which the system is aimed. We have been misled, Gould argues, by the same anthropocentrism that saw us at the centre of the Ptolemaic universe, to view ourselves as a kind of endpoint of evolution -- when by any measure available, the humble bacteria remains the most successful form of life around. Bacteria is the most numerous form of life in terms of any number of measures: raw numbers of individuals, numbers of species, genetic range between different species, ubiquity in differing environments, and even, perhaps, biomass (the argument here relies on the empirically somewhat shaky speculation that bacteria prosper throughout at least the outer crust of the earth, fed by geothermal rather than solar energy -- an argument needed to get their biomass over that of plant life, which otherwise easily dominates due to the weight of the worlds forests). However, our anthropocentrism leads us to draw those quaint evolutionary sequences from single-celled through multi-celled, through plant, animal and finally human life, as if evolution in total is pushing in our direction -- as if it is progressing, when really what we have is simply variation away from the bacteria. Life cannot really get any simpler than the simplest bacteria, and so an increasing amount of variation could only result in an increasingly complex few forms of life, so long as they are adaptively successful -- like the drunk man's random walk between a wall (through which he cannot pass) and a gutter (into which he will fall), he's going to end in the gutter eventually, even if he never aimed there. Progress towards complexity, then, is a by-product of random variation given enough time, and so can be gotten out of local adaptational principles without adding anything at all that dictates an overall trend towards complexity. Pretty simple really, and made all the more clear by Gould's reverse example of the disappearance of 0.400 hitting in baseball, which is an example of variation shrinking over time, giving the illusion of a driving trend (the illusory trend being the decline of hitting skill). In addition to the substance of the book, I liked Gould's often celebrated knack for quoting cultural sources in the midst of scientific argument -- in Full House he drops Whitman, Shakespeare, the Bible, Peirce and many others like they are the air he breathes. The only thing that remains troubling for me is Gould's conjecture that if a replay of evolution were played, we might not end up with conscious life, because of the many chance events required. He does say that he argues independently for this claim elsewhere (I think the book is called Wonderful Life, from memory), and so I might have to check that out -- I recall seeing a headline the other day in one of the popular science journals that proclaimed precisely the reverse, however -- a principle of convergence that entails a universe with physical laws the same as our own will produce life, as if inevitably, every replay. It's a shame we don't have Gould around any more, to see what his own reaction would be.

Professor Gould has made a powerful argument in his usually convincing manner. The book presents a strong case against the popular anthropocentric view of natural evolution. Gould offers an extension to Darwin's natural selection by giving learned opinions on statistical evidence (the disappearing of 0.400 batting average) and a philosophical amalgamation of logical deductions. The author's intelligence and knowledge shine through his articulate lather of collegiate vocabulary (some of which in Latin--that's the reason for the not-so-generous 4 stars.) Gould is an excellent science writter whose passion for his beloved field is self evident. I believe he too, as a human being, scholar and writer, is one of those rare points at the 'right wall' of extreme achievements. Three themes are particaularly noteworthy: variations (not complexity) breed excellence, natural selection implies no progress, humans are not the epitome of life in the universe but merely an actualization of an improbable chance in evolution. Some readers may appreciate his obvious exclusion of religious counterpoints; an argument, however, could be made that such otherwise inclusion of an diametrically opposing view would have shown academic well roundedness. The book is an intellectually entertaining work. If a reader is open to a paradigm shift, Gould is likely the author to do the shifting. His recent death is our national loss.

This book is about how to analyze data. It is the clearest and best written book on the subject I have read so far. Other well known books on the subject include Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Taleb and The Misbehavior of Markets A New Kind of Science by Mandelbrot. Although all these authors are brilliant and their respective books have their merits, Stephen Jay Gould's book is much clearer. While Taleb and Mandelbrot obsess about the flaws of the normal distribution assumption underlying investment theory, they both struggle in offering pragmatic alternatives. Gould instead studies the shape of the entire distribution that he calls the "Full House" and remains comfortable within a traditional statistical framework without building any castle of cards (referring to Mandelbrot fractal geometry).

Gould takes you on a really entertaining quantitative learning expedition by following three separate themes: 1) the disappearance of the 0.400 baseball hitter, 2) his run in with a deadly disease, and 3) the theory of evolution. These themes allow him to flesh out his analytical skills and share with you concepts that are often counterintuitive and occasionally revolutionary.

In his struggle with a deadly disease he illustrates how the median outcome (only 8 months to live) did not worry him much. What mattered to him after studying the related data was the skewness of the distribution with a long right-hand tail (meaning many survivors with normal remaining life span unaffected by the disease). He then studied what were the characteristics of these long term survivors (age, overall health, etc...). He noted he did share these characteristics and sure enough he survived this disease just fine. In his case, the median outcome was irrelevant. It was not his most likely outcome. Within this chapter he also introduces the concept of walls or limits. Many distributions have a left wall as figures can't be negative for many variables including stock prices, income level, and survivors' lifespan. For Gould, `walls' are key because they dictate that the distribution can expand in only the opposite direction.

When he moves on to the disappearance of the 0.400 hitter, Gould shows that the distribution of hitters butts against a right wall (upper limit of human achievement). He observed that the average hitting percentage has not changed much over time. But, the best hitters percentages has declined. Yet, he makes a case that today's hitters are better than the 0.400 hitters of yesteryears. What happened is that all positions improved commensurately (fielders, pitchers). So, the 0.400 stat is not an absolute but a relative measure of when batters outsmarted the other positions. He comes up with this perplexing theorem: "as play improves and bell curves march towards the right wall, variation must shrink at the right tail. The worst players got much better, and so did everybody else. But, the best players margin of relative superiority has consequently shrunk. He measured this phenomena by observing the steady decline of the standard deviation of batting average over the past century. And, indeed it declined steadily. So, in this closed system an improvement in performance was not marked by a rising average, but by a decline in standard deviation. The graphs on page 119 illustrate this complex concept very clearly.

Next, Gould moves on where he left a legacy as a leading evolutionary biologist: the theory evolution. Contrary to what we think the theory of evolution was misnamed. Darwin wanted to use the terms "descent with modification" instead of "evolution." Gould states Darwin referred to "evolution" because he succumbed to the cultural pressure of his era. The latter was obsessed with progress and the superiority of mankind. Gould strongly suggests that Darwin's original phrasing was more accurate. Gould goes on explaining that the animal kingdom history is captured by a right-hand skewed distribution that buts against a left wall of minimal complexity: the bacteria. An animal organism can not be less complex than that. With random mutation managed by natural selection, some species can only become more complex (not less so). Yet, this is not evolution. Bacteria still dominate the animal kingdom. They are more adaptable, more prevalent, more indestructible than any other animal organism. They are the only ones who would survive a nuclear holocaust and who can live in outer space. The process of complexity is somewhat random. Stephen Wolfram had reached the same conclusion in his very strange book, A New Kind of Science where he suggested that evolution was not so evolutionary but random (and replicable through cellular automata processes). Thanks to Gould, I now realize that Darwin and Wolfram pretty much agreed.

In the last chapter, Gould addresses if human culture is butting now against a right-hand wall of human potential. He thinks that is not so much the case in the sciences where he feels we have much more to figure out. But, he feels it is the case in the arts. Will we ever get another Beethoven? Another Shakespeare? Or another Michelangelo? Most probably not. Charles Murray studying the same subject in his excellent Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 reached pretty much the same conclusion.

Does evolution have a tendency to make more and more complex organisms? Most of us would give a confident yes answer to this question; however this book convinces its readers that no such tendency exists. Gould sets out to prove that since evolution works by local adaptation, organisms can evolve to be less or more complex, according to the environment's needs. This is also recognized by Darwin; however Darwin contemplates a drive towards greater complexity which would arise as a result of biotic competition: When one organism evolves to be more complex, the other should be even more complex in order to displace the former. This is famously illustrated in the wedge metaphor in the Origin of Species. The argument of Darwin makes rational sense. What I liked about this book is that Gould does not argue against this notion, but instead makes a number of predictions that would allow him to differentiate between driven (towards more complexity) and passive evolution. Using empirical data, and a number of definitions of complexity (such as size, nervous system, or fractal dimensions of ammonites) he shows that scientific data supports passive evolution.
However, this book is way too long to tell this story. Gould intentionally builds his case very slowly, which by the way makes a very amusing read, maybe except the parts which are almost a eulogy for the bacterial kingdoms. I believe one could easily understand the whole idea of the book by just reading chapter 12 and looking at figure 29. This idea, albeit simple to grasp in hindsight, is not straightforward to imagine (like all real good ideas), and since it gives a way to think of evolution in broader terms.
Idea is as follows:
There is a left wall of complexity for being alive.
Organisms evolve to higher or lower complexity with no inherent bias toward neither. Since there is a left wall, they can't be simpler than a certain level, however the right wall is open, so the highest complexity attained by organisms increases.
The overall shape and mode of complexity distribution doesn't change.

On the whole, I very much enjoyed this book as it presented me with some ideas with which I wasn't previously familiar. These ideas are fairly large and very interesting and thus I found reading this book ultimately very rewarding.

The only real problem with the book is that SJG does tend to write a little ponderously and some of his sentences do tend to slow readers down. In addition, I agree with many of the other reviewers that the book was a little long. I am not terribly bothered by this because, as I said, there were many interesting ideas which a slower, longer presentation meant more time for me to absorb.

Because the central theme of the book is that increasing complexity is not characteristic of evolution of life on earth, it goes without saying that people for whom the existence of evolution is open to question should not bother reading this book.

This book is a forceful illustration of some basic theorems presented by G.C. Williams in his book 'Adaptation and Natural selection': 'there is nothing in the basic structure of the theory of natural selection that would suggest the idea of any kind of cumulative progress' and 'Evolution was a by-product of the maintenance of adaptation'.

Gould corroborates these theorems by showing that the main modus of life on this planet is and has always been 'bacterial'.

He explains clearly that the second law of thermodynamics is only valid for closed systems, not for the earth.
He stresses also that cultural changes are fundamentally different from Darwinian evolutions. The former are Lamarckian, the latter are forced by the less efficient process of natural selection.
But Gould warns rightly that the enormous technological revolutions are not necessarily cultural or moral improvements because of the real risk of, e.g., environmental poisoning or a nuclear catastrophe.

One needs a basic knowledge of statistics to fully understand the book.

In his vigorous and persuasive style, S.J. Gould puts some good-looking scientific and moral ideas into a coffin.
Not to be missed.

Evolution and Genesis, are each other's most common adversaries with regards to the origi of mankind, however, there is another much more profound and believable explanation of our origins on this planet. Stephen Jay Gould, is Professor of zoology adn geology at Harvard University and the curator for invertebrate paleontology in the university's Museum of Comparative Zoology. Professor Gould compares and explains the decline of major league baseball batting averages to man's inevitable domination of the planet, as the, "spread of excellence". He continually contradicts misperceptions of millions in the belief of Darwin's, "Evolutions of the Species", and the Bible's theory of complexity are not characteristic of the evolution of life on Earth. As in his previous 15 books he vividly explains and supports his teachings and beliefs with biological and paleontological evidence. The Spread of Excellence, is the spreading out of expansion of complex organisms on this planet over a period of several billions of years. In a comparison of this spread of excellence to baseball, the significance of a decline in baseball hitting averages, since Ted William's 1940's 406 average, does not indicate a drop in performance or talent but represents an increase in talented players across the board. Dr. Gould is both a scientist and a writer extraordinaire. In a comparison of Full House tothe previously mentioned radical theories of the origin of mankind, Full House is but a natural extension or conclusion in reasoning and logical thinking in a complex world.