Full House: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin
Encyclopedia
Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin is a book by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould
, published in 1996. It was released in the UK as Life's Grandeur, with the same subtitle.
In Full House, Gould demonstrates how one type of statistical misconception leads to misunderstanding of important phenomena. The misconception is paying attention only to the "high score" or extreme value, when a continuous distribution of values exists (what Gould calls a "full house") and is what actually drives the phenomena.
The book focuses on two main examples of this misconception: the disappearance of the 0.400 batting average
in baseball, and the perceived tendency of evolution
towards "progress" making organisms more complex and sophisticated.
In the first example, Gould explains that the decline of the top batting average
does not imply that there has been a decline in the skill of baseball players. Quite the contrary: he shows that all that has happened is that the variance
of the batting average decreased as professional baseball got better and better, while the league average
remained constant as the game rules changed - together causing the extreme value of the distribution—the best batting average—to decrease as well.
In the second example, Gould points out that many people wrongly believe that the process of evolution has a preferred direction—a tendency to make organisms more complex and more sophisticated as time goes by. Those who believe in evolution's drive towards progress often demonstrate it with a series of organisms that appeared in different eons, with increasing complexity, e.g., "bacteria, fern, dinosaurs, dog, man". Gould explains how these increasingly complex organisms are just one hand of the complexity distribution, and why looking only at them misses the entire picture—the "full house". He explains that by any measure, the most common organisms have always been, and still are, the bacteria. The complexity distribution is bounded at one side (a living organism cannot be much simpler than bacteria), so an unbiased random walk
by evolution, sometimes going in the complexity direction and sometimes going towards simplicity (without having an intrinsic preference to either), will create a distribution with a small, but longer and longer tail at the high complexity end.
Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation....
, published in 1996. It was released in the UK as Life's Grandeur, with the same subtitle.
In Full House, Gould demonstrates how one type of statistical misconception leads to misunderstanding of important phenomena. The misconception is paying attention only to the "high score" or extreme value, when a continuous distribution of values exists (what Gould calls a "full house") and is what actually drives the phenomena.
The book focuses on two main examples of this misconception: the disappearance of the 0.400 batting average
Batting average
Batting average is a statistic in both cricket and baseball that measures the performance of cricket batsmen and baseball hitters. The two statistics are related in that baseball averages are directly descended from the concept of cricket averages.- Cricket :...
in baseball, and the perceived tendency of evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
towards "progress" making organisms more complex and sophisticated.
In the first example, Gould explains that the decline of the top batting average
Batting average
Batting average is a statistic in both cricket and baseball that measures the performance of cricket batsmen and baseball hitters. The two statistics are related in that baseball averages are directly descended from the concept of cricket averages.- Cricket :...
does not imply that there has been a decline in the skill of baseball players. Quite the contrary: he shows that all that has happened is that the variance
Variance
In probability theory and statistics, the variance is a measure of how far a set of numbers is spread out. It is one of several descriptors of a probability distribution, describing how far the numbers lie from the mean . In particular, the variance is one of the moments of a distribution...
of the batting average decreased as professional baseball got better and better, while the league average
Average
In mathematics, an average, or central tendency of a data set is a measure of the "middle" value of the data set. Average is one form of central tendency. Not all central tendencies should be considered definitions of average....
remained constant as the game rules changed - together causing the extreme value of the distribution—the best batting average—to decrease as well.
In the second example, Gould points out that many people wrongly believe that the process of evolution has a preferred direction—a tendency to make organisms more complex and more sophisticated as time goes by. Those who believe in evolution's drive towards progress often demonstrate it with a series of organisms that appeared in different eons, with increasing complexity, e.g., "bacteria, fern, dinosaurs, dog, man". Gould explains how these increasingly complex organisms are just one hand of the complexity distribution, and why looking only at them misses the entire picture—the "full house". He explains that by any measure, the most common organisms have always been, and still are, the bacteria. The complexity distribution is bounded at one side (a living organism cannot be much simpler than bacteria), so an unbiased random walk
Random walk
A random walk, sometimes denoted RW, is a mathematical formalisation of a trajectory that consists of taking successive random steps. For example, the path traced by a molecule as it travels in a liquid or a gas, the search path of a foraging animal, the price of a fluctuating stock and the...
by evolution, sometimes going in the complexity direction and sometimes going towards simplicity (without having an intrinsic preference to either), will create a distribution with a small, but longer and longer tail at the high complexity end.
See also
- Evolution of complexityEvolution of complexityThe evolution of biological complexity is an important outcome of the process of evolution. Evolution has produced some remarkably complex organisms - although the actual level of complexity is very hard to define or measure accurately in biology, with properties such as gene content, the number of...