Rating: 
Summary: Good but what is that baseball thing doing there?
Review: Stephen Jay Gould is one of those scientists just like Carl Sagan, Desmond Morris or Stephen Hawking who can write about their field of expertise in a way that is interesting, informative and original but still accessible for the lay person. As I am a mere curious about biology I always benefit from this approach. I had read other books from Gould that were essay collections and I was happy to find Full House that is a single subject book. To my surprise by reading the book I found out that he was talking about something that I really understand that is statistics.The center idea is that evolution doesn't follow a trend towards complexity. We see now more complex organisms than a few hundred million years ago simply because there's a lower limit for complexity but not an upper limit and speciation increases the variety of organisms. Therefore there's an apparent movement towards complexity. This can be described by simple statistics and much of the book is used to introduce some basic statistics concepts. The downside in my opinion is the lengthy example on baseball. I think this restricts the interest on the book mainly to United States' readers or maybe Cubans and Japanese. About one third of the book deals with statistics and baseball, too much for me. But in spite of the baseball thing it is still a great book Leonardo Alves November 2000
Rating: 
Summary: No Duh Stephen!
Review: The hypothesis is pretty basic and the book takes a long time to get around to it. Not worth the read. He could have summarized all the good thinking in this book into a fairly short magazine article. In fact, let me summarize it for you and save the time. Evolution doesn't inherently lead to more complex organisms (like humans), scientists just focus on those organisms at the expense of simple ones (like bacteria). There, now you can read something else instead.
Rating: 
Summary: Natural selection is not a synonym of progress
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Not his best, but worth a look
Review: This is a book full of colourful ideas and well-considered deductions that often gets lost in the details. The book's main problem is stylistic-- it would appear that it has not undergone the revisions and editing that are necessary for a book on the mass market. Its redundancy sometimes makes it a thicket to read (eg. see Chapter 3). It is too self-referential, self-congratulatory, and it pats itself on the back too much at times. And the digression into baseball and the decline of the .400 hitter is occasionally entertaining but is an obvious statement of statistics, and does not merit the pages that are devoted to it. Still, the crux of this book is sound, and the reasoning is interesting. Gould revisits some of the ground that he'd examined in his earlier work with paleontology, the Burgess Shale of "Wonderful Life," the intriguing ruminations on the fossil record. Gould's thesis is that progress, at least in the sense of complexity, is due more to a statistical random walk than a pre-planned template that was inevitably bringing it about. This point is subtle, and it is crucial to realize that he is not making some kind of value judgement here. Some of the reviews below confuse the thesis-- Gould is not "knocking humanity off its pedestal" or attacking anthropocentric arguments, or showing that bacteria are somehow superior (though his at-length examination of their features is quite fascinating). He is, furthermore, not questioning the notion of progress, or denying the increase in complexity. What he's saying is simply that, beginning from a state of minimal complexity (bacteria), a number of random events will take place, some of which will indeed generate higher complexity, some of which won't. Natural selection does not necessarily demand higher complexity, rather, it merely demands a better fit to a local niche. Thus it is not essential that life in general become more complex, but some lineages certainly will, and since there is no apparent "maximal complexity" (comparable to the minimal limit at bacteria), those trendlines will be astonishing in their extent and capability. Thus the lineages that produce that progress will naturally attract greater interest by evolutionists, and while this is a trend, it is not an exclusive one. That's all. Higher animals will tend to be more complex, and he's not saying this makes them superior, nor does he claim that they are self-deceiving or inferior in some deeper sense; he is simply pointing out that the mechanisms for generating higher complexity, which he acknowledges shows a trendline, are different, more unpredictable, more uncertain, and more variable than are often surmised. When the book avoids the verbal tangles that make it difficult in places, it's truly a joy to read. Just skim to get the general gist on which the thesis centres itself and come back to some of the more involved sections when you have more time to delve more deeply into the subtleties of the argument. It is, for all its flaws, an enjoyable collection of ideas from a proven author.
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