Full House : The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin

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Summary: Full House: The Spred of Excellence from Plato to Darwin
Review: Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin written by Stephen Jay Gould is a book that is anthropocentic in view, but nonetheless, eloquently argumentive for the new paradigm of progress in which variety, not complexity, is the true measure of excellence.

Gould is a master at writing about science, an explainer of difficult ideas and concepts, bringing a wealth of history in his writing for a well gounded in fact argument. Contentious and polemics are just two of Gould's passionate, but eloquent techniques for getting your attention. As you read this book you'll begin to understand why Gould is so popular as a writer... he's a wonderful storyteller.

"Full House" takes the reader on a journey to reconceptualize our view of natural reality in a fundamental way... making the argument... that variation is the ultimate reality of excellence as a function shaped by selection. Gould gets a little anecdotal as he works his arcana into his arguments, making the reading go by quickly, but more importantly you are learning all along.

Yes, if you've read a lot of Gould's work you'll read many points that Gould has brought to the table before. This being said, these are reconceptualized here, as Gould shows you what we intuitively know to be true. The dare-devilish humor and wit of Gould are evident in this work, bringing the reader along the thought-trail as he transcends one paradigm to another with fervor and intelligence.

This is a well written book as all of Gould's work... unintimidating with masterful storytelling technique.

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Summary: directionality
Review: Gould fascinating book is to be reckoned with, but the argument won't stand. The rise of modern science began with a challenge to the teleology of Aristotle and prospers in this in the realm of physics, while the imitation of this perspective in biology, although essential as a starting point perhaps,is and remains unclear. Gould's emphasis against directionality is an important challenge to wild speculation about teleology but in the end simply highlights the increasingly obvious appearance of an ambiguous directionality across the range of the fossil record. The irony in Gould's book comes at the end, where he cites the example of modern music in relation to genius. But this is unfortunately the precise counterexample to his thesis, for this has a different explanation. The range and distribution of much great art, cultural advance, indeed even science,across world history shows an eonic effect, a directionality that clearly corresponds to a nonrandom pattern (Cf. World History and the Eonic Effect, John Landon). The result is the 'punctuated equilibrium' so long sought for right in our midst. As strange as it seems, the incidence of genius by this evidence is only indirectly a genetic phenomenon. The classic example is right in front of us, Classical Greece. Why does this precise era stand out as such a rapid advance? It is part of this eonic evolution, and corresponds to something far different from the hypothesis of random emergence and has nothing to do with genetics. John Landon [e-mail]

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Summary: Arrogance in the eye of the beholder
Review: Gould presents an interesting statistics and biology lesson which would have been more interesting in 100 less pages, but very readable nonetheless. Gould seems to ignore the key point about human evolution until a few pages at the very end of the book. Consciousness is surely an evolutionary leap of the most revolutionary kind within evolution. Are humans really arrogant for feeling this specialness? Only if they ignore their relatedness to the rest of life, as he suggests. Fascinatingly, his take on the "accidental" nature of our evolution undoes the pretensions of both traditional humansists and religious believers, one seeing humankind as the apogee of a wholly material and essentially mechanical existence and the other as the center of God's wholly supernatural creation. What Gould cannot answer any more than any other scientist is from whence comes that unnameable something that sparked life and then ultimately self-conscious life

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Summary: Good stuff, bad format! OR Why cheetahs don't run marathons!
Review: Having read many of Stephen Jay Gould's collections of essays with much satisfaction, I was quite excited to try him in the book-length format of "Full House: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin," expecting it to allow him more room for deeper investigation and fuller development of his "excellent" ideas. Instead, 230 pages allowed Gould, one of science's foremost essayists, to be more exhausting than exhaustive.

His topic is interesting and important: how misconceptions about systems and distorting mental representations of them cause false perceptions of trends. Gould walks the reader through elementary statistical method and makes the abstract real and personal by recounting his own harrowing experience with cancer. He then uses the well kept data of baseball to demonstrate the narrowing of over-all variability in a system being perceived as a directed trend, in this case "downward" as .400 hitting disappears. Gould then combats ideas of "progress" being inherent in natural evolution, explaining that since first life was of the simplest organization ("You can't expect a lion to jump out of the primordial soup"), things could only become MORE complex, not less so. Vast time has therefore delivered more sophisticated organization in some organisms as a result of natural selection, but this does not replace or repudiate life's bacterial beginnings, which Gould takes great joy in showing still "rule" our planet. Instead, the most complex of organisms, a group to which we of course belong but which would have and could have existed without us, only represent expanded statistical variability of the entire system. Finally Gould contrasts the inefficient and random nature of biological evolution with the swift and purposeful development of culture and argues for the elimination of the misleading term "cultural evolution." The most overarching theme is that while representations of systems with a single number or attribute can sometimes be useful, we must recognize that these constructs are of our creation and can be very distorting because they are less than the whole, the "Full House" of the title.

Gould could have accomplished all of this in half as many pages as he presents to us in "Full House." The "book" suffers from two types of redundancy. The most annoying and inexplicable kind is simple repetitiveness, phrases and entire sentences used many times throughout, reminiscent of Homeric epic, and not typical of Gould. The other tautology found here is necessary for scientific journal writing, but tedious to the general reader. While I respect Gould's pride in not "dumbing-down" his work for the public and making them dig in and read hard, unless one is a sabermetrician (studying sport statistics) I am afraid a lot of this stuff is stupefying.

When addressing the "German virus" that created the greats of classical music and wondering where the modern equivalents are, Gould asserts that popular demand of novel form has been unfair to latter-day composers of music because all forms have been exhausted. He then dismisses rock music. Perhaps he has tongue in cheek, but I suspect elitism and codgerism. Gould must recognize that society and technology make the music, and jazz, rock, and rap are certainly innovative, if not inherently progressive.

Gould states in the introduction that "Full House" is a companion to "Wonderful Life," another book-length work of his. While I will next read this for his always fascinating ideas, I look forward to returning to the short essay format which made me a Stephen Jay Gould fan.

Rating:
Summary: Good stuff, bad format! OR Why cheetahs don't run marathons!
Review: Having read many of Stephen Jay Gould's collections of essays with much satisfaction, I was quite excited to try him in the book-length format of "Full House: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin," expecting it to allow him more room for deeper investigation and fuller development of his "excellent" ideas. Instead, 230 pages allowed Gould, one of science's foremost essayists, to be more exhausting than exhaustive.

His topic is interesting and important: how misconceptions about systems and distorting mental representations of them cause false perceptions of trends. Gould walks the reader through elementary statistical method and makes the abstract real and personal by recounting his own harrowing experience with cancer. He then uses the well kept data of baseball to demonstrate the narrowing of over-all variability in a system being perceived as a directed trend, in this case "downward" as .400 hitting disappears. Gould then combats ideas of "progress" being inherent in natural evolution, explaining that since first life was of the simplest organization ("You can't expect a lion to jump out of the primordial soup"), things could only become MORE complex, not less so. Vast time has therefore delivered more sophisticated organization in some organisms as a result of natural selection, but this does not replace or repudiate life's bacterial beginnings, which Gould takes great joy in showing still "rule" our planet. Instead, the most complex of organisms, a group to which we of course belong but which would have and could have existed without us, only represent expanded statistical variability of the entire system. Finally Gould contrasts the inefficient and random nature of biological evolution with the swift and purposeful development of culture and argues for the elimination of the misleading term "cultural evolution." The most overarching theme is that while representations of systems with a single number or attribute can sometimes be useful, we must recognize that these constructs are of our creation and can be very distorting because they are less than the whole, the "Full House" of the title.

Gould could have accomplished all of this in half as many pages as he presents to us in "Full House." The "book" suffers from two types of redundancy. The most annoying and inexplicable kind is simple repetitiveness, phrases and entire sentences used many times throughout, reminiscent of Homeric epic, and not typical of Gould. The other tautology found here is necessary for scientific journal writing, but tedious to the general reader. While I respect Gould's pride in not "dumbing-down" his work for the public and making them dig in and read hard, unless one is a sabermetrician (studying sport statistics) I am afraid a lot of this stuff is stupefying.

When addressing the "German virus" that created the greats of classical music and wondering where the modern equivalents are, Gould asserts that popular demand of novel form has been unfair to latter-day composers of music because all forms have been exhausted. He then dismisses rock music. Perhaps he has tongue in cheek, but I suspect elitism and codgerism. Gould must recognize that society and technology make the music, and jazz, rock, and rap are certainly innovative, if not inherently progressive.

Gould states in the introduction that "Full House" is a companion to "Wonderful Life," another book-length work of his. While I will next read this for his always fascinating ideas, I look forward to returning to the short essay format which made me a Stephen Jay Gould fan.

Rating:
Summary: On "Full House"
Review: I am not a creationist, yet I disagree with Gould's views.

Bacteria are indeed plentiful, but do they *think*? Are we to ignore the evolution of higher cognitive abilities in humanity?

The Perennial Philosophies are not "creationists," yet they too disagree with Gould. I would recommend that those who accept Gould's ideas read Ken Wilber's "A Theory of Everything," "Marriage of Sense and Spirit," "Sex, Ecology and Spirituality," or "Spectrum of Consciousness."

Our choice is not merely between Gould and "creationism," for there are other alternatives, ones that acknowledge the Divine in evolution, ones that don't fall for the reductive fallacy, one's that honor humanity's noble participation in the "Chain of Being." Truly, as Blake wrote, "All Religions are One" - except for the religion of Scientism.

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Summary: Of course creationists should read this!
Review: I am writing mainly in response to a reviewer who recommended that those who felt that the fact of evolution is in question should not bother reading this book. Because one of the major presuppositions of the creationist argument--that there is, over the history of life a consistent and obvious trend towards greater and greater complexity providing evidence of intelligent design--is refuted. For that reason, not only would I not turn creationists away from this book, I would encourage them to read it with an open mind.

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Summary: not an essential read, but a pleasant one
Review: I come to the book partly as a result of a direct self-study on the issues of creation-evolution-design debate, and partly because i like SJG's writings. At this point i am rereading some of his collections of essays in order to psych myself up for the week or more that his 'brick' _The Structure of Evolutionary Theory_ will take. I don't like baseball and had only skimmed this book previously, so for a couple of easy reading hours it occupied my mind.

It is basically about how to think about statistics. Summed up on pg 169ff. "Life's necessary beginning at the left wall. This is a takehome message from the excellent example of the drunkard's walk, pg 149ff. Left wall's are 'no one can earn less than zero dollars', 'no one can live and weight less than 50 lbs'. but Bill Gates can make enough money to skew the income and wealth curves so they look like capital 'L's. "Stability throughout time of the initial bacterial mode", most of the world's biomass is bacteria, no you or me. "Life's successful expansion must form an increasingly right-skewed distribution", this is the reply to evolution as progressive complexity to eventually produce US, thinking, creative, human beings. We are the >.400 baseball score, we are the very few that prove the rule that the masses are bacteria. "The myopia of characterizing a full distribution by an extreme item at one end", "Causality resides at the wall and in the spread of variation: the right tail is a consequence, not a cause", The only promising way to smuggle progress back into such a system is logically possible, but empirically false at high probability" and "Even a parochial decision to focus on the right tail alone will not yield the one, most truly desired conclusion, the psychological impetus to our yearning for general progress-that is, the predictable and sensible evolution to domination of a creature like us. endowed with consciousness."

It is not an earth-shaking book by any means, rather a collection of essays where the most interesting part is his explanation of dealing with cancer, which apparently is what he died from nearly 20 years after the first diagnosis, and the reasoning about statistics that started with his predicted death rates from it as he lay there in a hospital bed.

The drunkards walk could have been greatly enlarged, so for instance, by the addition of multiple drunkards bumping into each other, thus temporary right walls. Much like the biosphere is a changing mosaic of different species and different individuals.

But like all his essays, it is time well spent, not just to get a new example or more ways of handling data, but for the pleasant time with SJG and his excellent writing.

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Summary: An unsuccessful mutation for Gould
Review: I find it hard to believe I even feel compelled to write this, given the enthusiasm with which I've read many of Gould's earlier collections. In short, this book is a horribly belabored discussion about how changes in the level of variation of phenomena are sometimes incorrectly confused as evidence of trends. It's a valid observation although hardly insightful. Gould's three examples would have nicely filled out a 5 page monograph, yet they are somehow inflated here into a 200+ page book.

And with all this extra text, somehow obvious mistakes still creep in. My favorite: Gould's prime example involves the 'extinction' of .400-level hitting in major-league baseball, which he triumphantly relates to a narrowing of variation, rather than a relative trend of hitting skills relative to the general level of play that the professional game has evolved. The idea is sound, but a narrowing of variation here is ultimately a decrease (however pronounced) of probability of hitting .400, not an extinction of all hope. Extinction is a decline to a probability of ZERO, which we may want to practically assume in this case ... yet Gould's arguments as stated would apply, one would think, to Home Runs hit during a season as well, and in this year of McGwire and Sosa, clearly a small probability and a zero probability are two very different things.

The style of the book attempts academic sobriety and might succeed were it not that almost every in-line bibliographic reference uncannily refers to other stuff written by Stephen J. Gould, and the author displays a rampant need to resort to personal surmise to carry a point. Makes you feel like he should have done more research more widely for your $12.

If you have never sifted through data but suspect you may have to for some personal or professional reason, the book is worth skimming through before you get started. Otherwise, as we say for Boston baseball, wait until next year (or whenever) for a better effort from Gould.

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Summary: No increasing complexity
Review: I found the book to be entertaining. The observation that only local adaptations drive the organisms is important. In particular it is troublesome that there doesn't seem to be trend towards increasing complexity in biological systems. Like other readers I did find the book a bit too long and belabored.