Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin

Title: Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin Author: Gould, Stephen Jay ISBN: 9780609801406 Publisher: Three Rivers Press Published: 1997 Binding: Quality Language: English Publisher Description: Few would question the truism that humankind is the crowning achievement of evolution; that the defining thrust of life's history yields progress over time from the primitive and simple to the more advanced and complex; that the disappearance of .400 hitting in baseball is a fact to be bemoaned; or that identifying an existing trend can be helpful in making important life decisions. Few, that is, except Stephen Jay Gould who, in his new book Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, proves that all of these intuitive truths are, in fact, wrong. "All of these mistaken beliefs arise out of the same analytical flaw in our reasoning, our Platonic tendency to reduce a broad spectrum to a single, pinpointed essence, " says Gould. "This