Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould (PDF)

Description

Gould shows why a more accurate way of understanding our world is to look at a given subject within its own context, to see it as a part of a spectrum of variation and then to reconceptualize trends as expansion or contraction of this “full house” of variation, and not as the progress or degeneration of an average value, or single thing.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Bacteria and baseball. Few authors besides Stephen Jay Gould could write convincingly about both…Wandering about [Full House’s] well-decorated rooms, nooks, and attics is a pleasure left to the reader.”―John Allen Paulos, Washington Post Book World About the Author Stephen Jay Gould was Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University and Vincent Astor Visiting Professor of Biology at New York University. A MacArthur Prize Fellow, he received innumerable honors and awards and wrote many books, including Ontogeny and Phylogeny and Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (both from Harvard).

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Stephen Jay Gould was an author of popular science addressing topics in evolution. His specific credentials included his status as a professor of zoology and geology and a specialty in invertebrate paleoclimatology. Despite those increasingly complex academic credentials he wrote very comfortable and deep essays and books. His topics in Full House are several particular aspects of evolution. Fortunately he was writing in a time before this evolution had become as militarized as it appears to be today and despite reviewer comments otherwise he had religious values and as such tended to respect others with religious values. His books always include humor and self-deprecation.Drawing examples from several of his favorite topics including baseball, Gould addresses the popular misconception that evolution necessarily moves in any direction or necessarily favors either the process that resulted in the human being or any singularly upward trend.By making the argument that bacteria can rightfully claim to be the dominant life form across the history of Earth as a living planet Gould deliberately disorients those readers who had been taught that humans are dominant .On a more abstract level he demonstrates a scientific model known as the drunkard’s walk. This is a classic thought problem wherein it is shown that if you have an absolute minimum value like zero that all variation must exist at some higher number. The analogy is to a drunken person stumbling out of a bar where if there is a wall to the left of his intended path and therefore his stumbling root must favor the other direction.The third leg of his argument allows him to use sports mostly baseball to demonstrate not only can there be a right wall where in the variations effectively exist between two values one absolute and the other less easily defined but relatively easy to demonstrate. He has his own argument for why the .4000 hitter has disappeared from professional baseball. There is no absolute reason why this number has become unobtainable but the evidence would suggest that some combination of factors effectively created a right-hand wall.By combining arguments that are usually easy for a scientifically oriented reader to follow Stephen Gould’s Full House walks the careful reader through a sequence of arguments that effectively address a number of problems in understanding the statistics of the evolutionary process.This is a rereading by me of this particular book. As much as science is moved forward in the 20 years since publication of I believe this content is sufficiently general to still be consistent with more recent finds. More than this I’ve always found it a pleasure to follow Gould as he helps me to answer questions about evolution and to enjoy myself with his friendly and personal writing style.

⭐There are already several excellent reviews below describing the contents of this book. My purpose for writing is to report that I continue to use it very successfully with high school honor students, and can strongly recommend it as a supplement for honors classes.Particularly useful are the statistical modeling examples…experiments the students love doing (‘hands-on’), such as the drunkard’s walk (random deviation from a left wall). Using a coin-flip, the students can repeat the experiment several times and record some excellent data, especially when the entire class is compiled. Then, of course, simulate the data with Excel.There are several lucid examples which are excellent for class discussion…although the baseball stats get a bit long for the typical HS student.In 2000, I took a small group of students to the AAAS meeting in Washington DC to meet with SJ after we’d studied his book thoroughly in class. He met with us several times, and it seemed as though we already knew him. He was gracious and engaging, and the students were inspired.The prose in this book is intimate, honest, and illuminating.I miss this beautiful man.

⭐If you are a Gould fan, this book is a must read. He shatters the common perception that the processes of natural selection and evolution have an intrinsic bias leading to a unidirectional trajectory from simple to complex life forms. Although I am a graduate level scientist who was well-schooled in the theory of evolution, I have to admit that I too was under the belief that life always progressed from simple to complex forms. However, using simple examples understandable by laypersons (e.g., the disappearance of the .400 hitter in baseball), Gould demonstrates how statistical distributions distorted by right and left “walls” or limitations can lead to major misperceptions about trends and the directionality of change. Gould was a brilliant scientist and a gifted, engaging writer whose work can be enjoyed by all. In my humble opinion, this is one of his best works.

⭐Wenn ich etwas über Statistik wissen möchte, schaue ich lieber in ein Mathematikbuch.

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⭐Good book at a great price.

⭐La démonstration, à la portée de toute personne ouverte aux sciences, que l’avènement de l’être humain est contingent, aléatoire, et aurait très bien ne pas être arrivé.

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⭐無類の野球ファンでもあるグールドが引き合いに出す「４割打者の絶滅」であるが、これが単に野球の話ではなく、進化論につながっていくというところはサイエンスライターとしての著者の真骨頂であろう。一見関係のない事柄をこじつけでなく、背景にある理論の繋がりを通じて進化論の話まで華麗に展開していく筆の冴えはみごとである。最精鋭ともいえる存在の消滅は決して全体の衰退ではなく、逆に安定を、繁栄を示しているという証明は視点をどこにおいて物事を見るべきかでまったく見え方が変わるということを痛感させられた。ついつい目立つ存在に注目しがちであるが、全体のトレンドを捉えることがいかに重要であるかということをまざまざと示したといえるだろう。私は生物学には詳しくないので、様々な論争でのグールドの見解の妥当性は判断しかねるが、全体を捉える視座、科学的・分析的なものの見方という点では非の付け所がないと思わされた。同じくハヤカワ文庫で出版されるグールドの著作は『ワンダフルライフ』と本書をのぞいては雑誌連載をもとに編集した物であるためか、話題があちらこちらにとび、散漫な感がある。本書は当初から単行本として執筆されていることもあり、著者の考えがきれいにまとめられており、グールドが進化とは、科学とはといったことをどのように考えているかを知るには好個の書であると言える。

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⭐I like this book comparatively.I want to recommend this book to other people.

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