Full house : the spread of excellence from Plato to Darwin

Book 1996

"In Full House, Gould corrects the prevalent, anthropocentric view of the world with an eloquent argument for a new paradigm of progress in which 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 somehwere"."--BOOK JACKET.

Item Details & Discovery

Explore Topics & Themes:

Evolution (Biology)

Excellence

Natural history

Nature

View technical details & catalog information

ISBN:

9780517703946
0517703947

Edition:

First edition

Description:

244 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Notes:

Includes index
Bibliography: pages 231-237

Contents:

Huxley's chessboard
Darwin amidst the spin doctors
Different parsings, diffrent images of trends
Case one: a personal story
Case two: Life's little joke
Starting the problem
Conventional explanatioins
A plausibility argument of general improvement
0.400 hitting dies as the right tail shrinks
Why the death of 0.400 hitting records improvement of play
A philosophical conclusion
The bare bones of natural selection
A preliminary example at smallest scale, with some generalities on the evolution of body size
The power of the modal bacter, or why the tail can't wag the dog
An epilog on human culture

LCCN:

96196285

Control Number:

61090

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