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No bias in evolution towards greater complexity - explained

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Yes and No

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Marching forward? backward? . . . or just "diversifying"?

Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin
Stephen Jay Gould
Manufacturer: Three Rivers Press
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Release Date: 1997-09-16

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The human mind has a trusty device for simplifying a complex world: reduce to averages and identify trends. Although valuable, the risk is that we ignore variations and end up with a skewed view of reality. In evolutionary terms, the result is a view in which humans are the inevitable pinnacle of evolutionary progress, instead of, as Stephen Jay Gould patiently argues, "a cosmic accident that would never arise again if the tree of life could be replanted." The implications of Gould's argument may threaten certain of our philosophical and religious foundations but will in the end provide us with a clearer view of, and a greater appreciation for, the complexities of our world.

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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 way of thinking allows us to confirm our most ingrained biases that humans are the supreme being on this planet; that all things are inherently driven to become more complex; and that almost any subject can be expressed and understood in terms of an average."

In Full House, Gould shows why a more accurate way of understanding our world (and the history of life) is to look at a given subject within its own context, to see it as a part of a spectrum of variation rather than as an isolated "thing" and then to reconceptualize trends as expansion or contraction of this "full house" of variation, and not as the progress or degeneration of an average value, or single thing. When approached in such a way, the disappearance of .400 hitting becomes a cause for celebration, signaling not a decline in greatness but instead an improvement in the overall level of play in baseball; trends become subject to suspicion, and too often, only a tool of those seeking to advance a particular agenda; and the "Age of Man" (a claim rooted in hubris, not in fact) more accurately becomes the "Age of Bacteria."

"The traditional mode of thinking has led us to draw many conclusions that don't make satisfying sense," says Gould. "It tells us that .400 hitting has disappeared because batters have gotten worse, but how can that be true when record performances have improved in almost any athletic activity?" In a personal eureka!, Gould realized that we were looking at the picture backward, and that a simple conceptual inversion would resolve a number of the paradoxes of the conventional view.

While Full House deftly reveals the shortcomings of the popular reasoning we apply to everyday life situations, Gould also explores his beloved realm of natural history as well. Whether debunking the myth of the successful evolution of the horse (he grants that the story still deserves distinction, but as the icon of evolutionary failure); presenting evidence that the vaunted "progress of life" is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward complexity; or relegating the kingdoms of Animalai and Plantae to their proper positions on the genealogical chart for all of life (as mere twigs on one of the three bushes), Full House asks nothing less than that we reconceptualize our view of life in a fundamental way.

From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews:

No bias in evolution towards greater complexity - explained.......2007-04-11

Does evolution have a tendency to make more and more complex organisms? Most of us would give a confident yes answer to this question; however this book convinces its readers that no such tendency exists. Gould sets out to prove that since evolution works by local adaptation, organisms can evolve to be less or more complex, according to the environment's needs. This is also recognized by Darwin; however Darwin contemplates a drive towards greater complexity which would arise as a result of biotic competition: When one organism evolves to be more complex, the other should be even more complex in order to displace the former. This is famously illustrated in the wedge metaphor in the Origin of Species. The argument of Darwin makes rational sense. What I liked about this book is that Gould does not argue against this notion, but instead makes a number of predictions that would allow him to differentiate between driven (towards more complexity) and passive evolution. Using empirical data, and a number of definitions of complexity (such as size, nervous system, or fractal dimensions of ammonites) he shows that scientific data supports passive evolution.
However, this book is way too long to tell this story. Gould intentionally builds his case very slowly, which by the way makes a very amusing read, maybe except the parts which are almost a eulogy for the bacterial kingdoms. I believe one could easily understand the whole idea of the book by just reading chapter 12 and looking at figure 29. This idea, albeit simple to grasp in hindsight, is not straightforward to imagine (like all real good ideas), and since it gives a way to think of evolution in broader terms.
Idea is as follows:
There is a left wall of complexity for being alive.
Organisms evolve to higher or lower complexity with no inherent bias toward neither. Since there is a left wall, they can't be simpler than a certain level, however the right wall is open, so the highest complexity attained by organisms increases.
The overall shape and mode of complexity distribution doesn't change.

Another Superb Offering .......2006-12-25

I have been rereading several books in my library on natural selection and came across this one sandwiched between "wonderful Life" and "Eight Little Piggies". The late Stephen Gould was near the top of my "best science writer" list. This was not due to only his literary quality (very high) but to both the always intriguing subject matter and his gentle exposition of natural selection. Unlike some scientists (who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent) he feels no need to bash, ridicule, insult or fight those who disagree with his view.

His own theories on species creation have been debated extensively but this book is all about contrast. On the one hand he stresses over and over that evolution is without guidance, meaningless to the change that is occurring. The story of the "evolution" of the horse is a good example with the point being that it is a FAILED end-product of evolution. In the huge bush of horse ancestors only one remains. Again, he points out that evolutionary changes were not done for the purpose of a future species. We, as human beings, naturally see current organisms as the final state of a long, continuously evolving pathway. This is absolutely wrong - we are simply at our current state and that's it

A good portion of the book was give over to the question, "Why are there no .400 hitters in baseball?" Paradoxically, he demonstrates that the extinction of this breed is a sign of overall general increase in excellence. This is the paradox - although natural selection is not directed by purpose our own actions are. Of the 50 million species only ours is aware that we are only one of 50 million. ALong the way we get acquainted with a variety of mathematical models, particularly the infamous bell curve that says so much depending on which way it is slanted. Overall - A

Yes and No.......2006-10-27

Having finished Stephen Gould's book Full House let me opine. An excellent book by all accounts, however, to quibble, he does not convince that there is no innate driving mechanism to greater orders of complexity in the universe. For instance, his argument that if you were to replay the tape of human evolution you would get a different result every time begs the question of yes, but how comes it turned out the way that it did....

In other words, he takes an assumption as fact, that everything happens by accident is evidence for him that everything happens by accident. I guess I don't really understand this....it seems to me hard to explain how sub-atomic particles became you and me. Yes, you can say it was all by accident, but it is just a little more than curious that at every stage of evolution, things took a quantum jump to a higher level of complexity and freedom (which goes with it). I've long since stopped disputing the facts of evolution which at this point are overwhelming, billions of bits of data from every field of science all converge on the same conclusion. However, whether it all just happened to be so for no paricular reason, with no outcome in view can't be proven.....

I occurs to me that we should stop thinking in terms of creation vs. evolution and think in terms of "emergence." You and I are what God is doing right now, what God was doing with dinosaurs is about what God was doing then....Now Gould is taking pains to get humans to stop thinking of themselves as some special example at the top of an apex, or that horses today are necessarily an advance over horses yesterday. As he points out, bacteria is much more successful biologically than humans, they're more numerous, they've been around much longer, they can survive miles underground and in water at temperatures of several hundreds....on and on. "Progress" simply defined, as leading to us because we're so special, doesn't exist.

However, however, however, he overdoes it. Because one can truly have it both ways. We can easily envision another quantum jump from homo sapien sapiens to another level. Yes, we might not be the apex, but that doesn't mean that the general trend of to higher orders of complexity is invalidated. He thinks trends, largely speaking, are greatly exaggerated. We see trends where they don't exist.

He says that the path from bacteria to you and me doesn't represent a "trend" but simply a movement away from a left wall of development. It's a very complex argument, but to use his example, imagine a drunk is walking along a path between a wall and a ditch, which way can he go? Into the ditch everytime. In other words, bacteria represent a left wall, a so simple you can't get lots simpler....the ditch toward complexity is where all the change is going to occur. And he uses many examples from baseball and such to prove his point.

There is, also, he says a right wall....in other words, you can only so far in the rightward direction before you max out. No baseball player CAN throw a ball at 140 miles an hour, world records in sports are becoming less frequent, the faster and faster greats are less and less common, not because they no longer exist, but because they're at the tether ends of the right wall....

But....here is exactly where I find him to be unconvincing. In a universe which went from subatomic particles to you and me, where does he get the confidence to put limits on what baseball players may yet achieve?? Even if it's all by accident, you can't rule out further accidents which may yet produce the baseball player who throws at 140 mph.

Second, he begs the question of why the left wall exists in the first place. You can say the left wall just so happens to be there in the nature of things, it just so happens to be the case that.....you can take things for granted. But that doesn't prove a daggone thing. To be intellectually humble, all you can say is, this is the way it is, if there's a "why" to it we haven't discovered that......

Since I'm going on and on, let me go on even further, many theistic evolutionists have made a human-centered error of defining what God is doing in the universe in terms of "progress." Everything mounts up to a higher and higher level of complexity which becomes defined as progress. That's a political imposition on the idea of evolution, as Gould makes clear, Darwin mostly only said of natural selection that it was a local adaption to environmental pressures. The notion of progress was a Victorian political doctrine based on manifest destiny of white colonialists. In the course of time, these two notions became fused....human-centrically. Social-darwinism being a case pre-eminent...

Progress does not necessarily imply evolution upwards and onwards to greater complexity leading to me and thee, evolution is not necessarily progressive. Granted.

But is it the case that simply because something isn't quantifiable it doesn't exist. Let's use one of Gould's own examples from sports. He says "hot hands" don't exist in sports because all of the statistical research shows that just because a basketball player (he used the example of a baseball player, but I'm switching over) makes a shot, doesn't mean he'll make another shot.

Statistically this doesn't appear. But in reality, anyone who has ever watched basketball knows, players get on a roll....we even have terms to describe it "when you're hot your hot" or "he's in the zone" or "he's unstoppable tonight." Mathematically there's no such thing as "when you're hot your hot" but does that then mean it doesn't exist? Harvard biologist extraordinaire Stephen Gould says yes, humble me, lawn tech extraordinaire says no.

Here's a perfect example of ruling something out simply because it isn't quantifiable. He's a great biologist but a poor psychologist. What is happening when a basketball player has "hot hands?" Statistically, apparently, nothing. Psychologically, the player has lost self-consciousness. A player (and often the audience) who is in the zone, that space where everything starts to click, is lost in the moment. The crowd and the player merge, one seething body making slam dunk after slam dunk.....Sit ringside and get caught up in the moment, it's a thing of beauty....mathematically beauty doesn't appear, but subjectively who can't get lost in wonder when it all starts to come together and the team is on a roll.....looking back you can say that was all just sports talk, but I demure....

There is a bridge between science and God and that is through the psyche, what's happening inside of people that can't be quantified....there is a pattern in the universe which maybe cannot be defined so simply as progress defined as higher orders of complexity leading to me and thee.....but however defined, it seems to me to be beyond the powers of linear thinking to simply rule it out because it can't be quantified....if it doesn't exist in math it doesn't exist at all seems to me to be a poor science indeed.....

As Shakespeare said, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." -JL

We're Surrounded.......2006-05-23

Having been buried by statistics courses in college, it has always amazed me how people build entire empires out of the slimmest of statistical information. Making judgments based purely on an 'mean' response is an invitation to the error of thinking that a change in average means a trend is developing, or that you are even likely to get an average response in any particular case. To be able to make an even educated guess one has to look at the mode, the median, and various statistical distributions. Even then, it's possible to be wrong, but at least you will have an excuse.

This book by the late Stephen Gould is one of the best discussions of statistical fallacy I've ever seen. Gould starts out with the story of is confrontation with a form of cancer that is almost invariably fatal within a very short time period. Or rather, the modal life span after diagnosis is very short. Gould was a survivor, and his discussion of how the mode has very little to do with individual cases, and how that the studies are skewed by being left limited (there are no negative life expectancies) is enlightening.

Having made his initial point, Gould elaborates it by turning to the disappearance of the .400 batting average. Because there is a lot more information about baseball than there is about a rare form of cancer, Gould is able to look at another form of statistical skew, where there may very well be an upper physical limit, and the field involves multiple variables (pitching, hitting, etc.). By the time he is done the reader will be confident that batting is doing fine, and ready for the real reason Gould wrote Full House - just who really is the boss of earth.

From Victorian times onward one of the 'myths' we humans tell each other is that we are somehow the apex of evolution. That not only is progress (as expressed by intelligence and complexity) inevitable, but that it actually is progress. Using the same statistics that analyzed the .400 average, Gould explodes many of the misunderstandings about what evolution actually is. We are reminded that humans, in fact, all of the 'animal kingdom' are the tiniest part of life on the earth. The creatures with the most species, best ability to survive, and sheer numbers and weight, are the lowly bacteria. For some 3.4 billion years they have ruled the earth, and everything else has been their food.

On top of finding out that we may very well be the last representatives of a dying genera, we must suffer with the fact that we have been beaten out by the most elementary of life forms. Gould reminds us that 'It is a gift to be simple,' writing in a style that is both entertaining and easily accessible. You may start out statistically disadvantaged, but by the end of 'Full House' you will have a much clearer picture of statistics and evolution. While Gould does not break any new territory in this book, he does take us on a wonderful tour of the real world.

Marching forward? backward? . . . or just "diversifying"?.......2004-08-05

After seeing that there were already some 40 or so reviews of this wonderful book, and having read it some years ago I was reluctant to add another. But, being a fan of Gould's magnificent "Wonderful Life" (1989) and seeing some negative, and misleading reviews of this particular book, I had to chime in. To begin with, Gould's books are highly readable and enjoyable as he has a great capacity to relate objective science to the subjective world. "Full House" will be challenging to you if you do not already understand or buy into Darwinism. If not, you'll definitely take issue with his seemingly harsh conclusions (i.e. "Humans are here by the luck of the draw, not the inevitability of life's direction or evolution's mechanism" p.175). The book is about diversity and "the spread of excellence" on earth. Consequently, it puts man in his place (just another organism amongst many, and quite minor compared to bacteria) amongst greater geologic history; and this can be a bit difficult to swallow at first. But read on!

Utilizing baseball and the disappearance of .400 ave. hitting as one major example to illustrate the nature of evolution, Gould shows through statistics how one aspect of the game (hitting) has declined over time, while the rest (pitching & fielding) have increased in skill level. It all makes perfect sense. That's not to say one can't argue with him (although he's now dead), but Gould's contributions to evolutionary theory can be controversial to the unconverted - especially the religious (namely, Catholics & those with firmly held, comfortable beliefs in Manifest Desitiny). Gould (and most science) is directly opposed to this type of anthropocentric thinking; but not, however, traditional Deist beliefs in which God does not interfere with human evolution. In many regards, "Wonderful Life" and "Full House" comfortably fit into an older, more original Christianity - that of Gnosticism, in which the earth is a sort of abandoned proving ground. Gould conjectures: "...perhaps we are, whatever our glories and accomplishments, a momentary cosmic accident that would never rise again if the tree of life could be replanted from seed and regrown under similar conditions" p.18.

The premiss of "Full House" is that "progress is, nonetheless, a delusion based on social prejudice and psychological hope engendered by our unwillingness to accept the plain (and true) meaning of the fourth Freudian revolution" p.20. Later on, Gould reiterates: "The vaunted progress of life is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward inherently advantageous complexity" p.173. He could be wrong. He could be right. He does however back up his ideas with plenty of observable proofs, experience (he was a paleontologist), and statistics - all in Gould's entertaining and thought-provoking signature style. The fact is, neither Gould nor Darwin nor Freud is saying a person ought to stop striving for excellence - in fact, they're encouraging it! Reading a book like "Full House", or "Wonderful Life" is challenging to many commonly held assumptions about human life, and thus, potentially upsetting, but ultimately uplifting in my view. One optimistic conclusion that may be drawn from this seemingly dismal and dry evolutionary theory is that our life is a unique, wonderful opportunity unparalleled, and definitely not the norm of things.

If the above quotes from the book sound intriguing to you, and you're craving more information, then I highly recommend you try both "Full House" and it's paradigm shifting predecessor, "Wonderful Life". I guarantee that you'll come away with a mind more open, and thoughtful about evolution and life than ever before. Happy reading!

FULL HOUSE. The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin.

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FULL HOUSE. The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin.
Stephen Jay [1941 - 2002]. Gould
Manufacturer: Harmony Books,
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Full House. The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin.

Manufacturer: Three Rivers Press.
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ASIN: B000I38MAE

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Full House: The spread of excellence from Plato to Darwin
Stephen Jay Gould
Manufacturer: NY
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ASIN: B000H57CJ0

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The 2005 joint Cryogenic Engineering Conference and International Cryogenic Materials Conference (CEC-ICMC) was held at the Keystone Resort and Conference Center in Keystone, Colorado, from August 29th to September 2nd, 2005. We celebrated the 50th anniversary for the CEC and the 30th anniversary for the ICMC. To mark these milestones, CEC-ICMC returned to Colorado, the site of the first joint meeting. Over 700 attendees from 24 countries enjoyed the technical program, industrial exhibit, and special events. There were over 450 papers presented in plenary, oral, and poster sessions. All papers were peer-reviewed. Papers in the ICMC part of the conference present the latest information on materials and their properties used in cryogenic temperatures. Topics include the physical and mechanical properties of metals and alloys at cryogenic temperatures, insulation materials used in magnets for large-scale applications, recent developments in the conventional low-temperature superconductors, YBCO coated conductors, Bi-based superconductors, and MgB2 conductors. Conductor stability and AC losses as well as superconductor applications were also covered at this conference.

Advance in Cryogenic Engineering, Volume 20 Only

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Advance in Cryogenic Engineering, Volume 20 Only
K. D. Timmerhaus
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Advances in Cryogenic Engineering

Manufacturer: Springer
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Advances in Cryogenic Engineering

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advances in cryogenic engineering

Advances in Cryogenic Engineering

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advances in cryogenic engineering.......2007-01-18

A very exhaustive collection of publications mainly relating to cryostats used in cryogenic experimentation and some good articles on super insulatin and super conductivity .Though addition of some more details on cryogenic engineering applications would have made the book more interesting-Shankar Ghosh -India

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Advances in Cryogenic Engineering

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Advances in Cryogenic Engineering (Materials) (Advances in Cryogenic Engineering)

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Advances in Cryogenic Engineering (Materials) (Advances in Cryogenic Engineering)

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Advances in Cryogenic Engineering (Materials) - Volume 46, Parts A & B (Advances in Cryogenic Engineering)

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Advances in Cryogenic Engineering (Materials) - Volume 46, Parts A & B (Advances in Cryogenic Engineering)

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There is an increasing effort, world wide, to advance the uses of superconductivity in power engineering and utility applications. Many of the technical papers here, on materials, applications and economics, reflect this tendency. There is also extensive coverage of both low and high temperature superconductivity and cryogenic materials and testing.

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The Best of SlashNOT is a collection of short satirical stories ranging from true observations of humorous events to hilarious absurdity that any true geek will love. The Best of SlashNOT takes the most humorous stories from posted on SlashNOT.com and presents them in the order that the SlashNOT community ranked them.

You won't find Geek humor funnier or more laser focused on technology than The Best of SlashNOT. Articles include all the community favorites, like:

. Einstein returns from grave to bitch-slap dark matter

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Universe even darker and scarier than previously thought

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SlashNOT is a satirical website that parodies Slashnot.com, the ridiculously popular open-source advocacy website. In addition to the stories and comments from SlashNOT.com, The Best of SlashNOT includes exclusive commentary and insights from the author and editor of the website.

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