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In his first single-subject book of original
writing since the New York Times best-seller Wonderful
Life, Stephen Jay Gould explodes our misperceptions
about the nature of progress, the nature of excellence,
and the nature of nature.
With more than fifteen books in print, Stephen
Jay Gould is the dean of contemporary popular science writers.
In this iconoclastic but rigorously presented book, Dr.
Gould demonstrates with his characteristic passionate humanism
and rational clarity that, contrary to popular opinion,
progress and increasing complexity are not characteristic
of the evolution of life on Earth.
In Full House, Gould corrects the
prevalent, anthropocentric view of the world with an eloquent
argument for a new paradigm of progress in rich variety
-- not complexity -- is the true measure of excellence.
In the process, Full House teaches us how to read
trends as changes in variation within full systems, rather
than as "things moving somewhere." To illustrate
this theme, Gould discusses seemingly disparate topics such
a drunkard's walk along a sidewalk, the disappearance of
0.400 hitting in baseball, the absence modern Mozarts, the
evolution of the horse, and continuing dominance of bacterial
life on the continuing dominance of bacterial life on the
planet. Full House shapes a unified, reasonable picture
of nature, history, and life that is often at odds with
what we intuitively "know" to be true.
A major scientific statement from a leading
evolutionary scientist, Full House, in its boldest
aim, asks us to reconceptualize our view of natural reality
in a fundamental way. Just as a full house in poker expresses
an excellence of all parts together, fortuitous in origin
but shaped by selection, this Full House argues that
variation is the ultimate reality of excellence. As in all
of Stephen J. Gould's writings, he supports his teaching
and main arguments with an abundance of biological and paleontological
marvels, anecdotes, and arcana -- nothing less than Charles
Darwin's vision "endless forms most beautiful and most
wonderful." Gould celebrates the true nature of excellence
of life on Earth as demonstrated by the fullness and constancy
of its variety, ingenuity, and diversity.
Stephen Jay Gould is the Alexander Agassiz
professor of zoology and professor of geology at Harvard
and the curator for invertebrate paleontology in the university's
Museum of Comparative Zoology. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and New York City.
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