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.
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