Full House

"Full House" is the name of a book by Stephen Jay Gould that I recently read. Parts of it were easy to understand, other parts beyond me (like the relevance of the phrase 'full house' which he uses to depict something or other a number of times). The book was written in the 1990s. Let me try to tell you what I got from it.

1. Darwin was correct, but Darwinism does not necessarily denote progress, and Darwin was careful not to use the term progress. The identification of Darwin with progress, and the relationship of biological Darwinism to social Darwinism, are both the results of what today would be called spin doctors, who take unbiased information and bias it to support their own predelictions. The word 'evolution' should not be value driven, and the same word should not be used to define very different biological and sociological changes.

2. Trends are difficult to spot, and are generallly defined, as above, to support one's slant on things. Same is true with saying that things always evolve towards the more complex; in fact, often they trend towards the simplest.

3. Varieties do not necessarily increase. Look at horses, who evolved from a large variety of now extinct types. (I think the same could be said about apples.)

4. The fact that there are no more .400 hitters does not mean (a) that there won't be in the future, or (b) that it means that the older .400 hitters were better than those today. It may mean that the other players are better and there is a lesser chance of a .400 hitter. Also, you can't gauge the baseball statistics in a clear way because every time there was a trend to higher or lower batting averages, the game would do something to the rules, to bring things back to a happy median average of about .260. Also, if you graph baseball capacities, there would be a wall which would denote the maximum of human capability. As you near the wall, gains get smaller.

5. To say that the world changed from the age of bacteria, to fish, to animals, to humans (for example) is not quite accurate. Even today, bacteria remain the largest, and the simplest group of living creatures, and will probably at one point be the eventual survivors.

6. To say that humanity is the end result of an omnipresent God makes no sense other than as a product of human conceit.

7. The reason there are no more Mozarts today is only because humanity identifies with change so much, that someone writing in the manor of Mozart would be disregarded.

8. If you get sick, and the odds are, say, 50% chance of a 5 year survival, those odds mean nothing with regard to you, although you get closer if you limit the comparison group to people who share more and more characteristics (age, general health, attitude, location of residence, economic status, etc.)

I know that this is a simple explanation of a book that has much more to offer. But I am just a simple reader.

Gould, who was a paleontologist, died a year or so ago, about 20 years after being diagnosed with a disease which was to have taken its toll much, much sooner.