| - by John Allen Paulos, Washington Post• He explains that by any measure, the most common organisms have always been, and still are, the bacteria | It was released in the United Kingdom as Life's Grandeur, with the same subtitle and with an additional eight-page introduction entitled "A Baseball Primer for British Readers" |
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| Publication date 1996 Media type Print, e-book Pages 244 pp | 400 in baseball, and the perceived tendency of 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.
| - by , Reprinted in Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003 | - by Richard York and Brett Clark, Monthly Review• - by Michael Shermer, Los Angeles Times• One misconception people often have is focusing too narrowly on averages or extreme values rather than the full spectrum of variation in the entire system what Gould calls the "full house" of variation |
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| - by David Papineau, New York Times• - from Publishers Weekly See also [ ]• Summary [ ] Full House aims to explain to the general reader how misconceptions about statistics can lead people to misunderstand the role variation plays in driving trends in complex systems | 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 |
The complexity distribution is bounded at one side a living organism cannot be much simpler than bacteria , so an unbiased 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.
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