Full House Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  Acknowledgments

  A Modest Proposal

  Part One - How SHALL WE READ AND SPOT A TREND?

  1 - Huxley’s Chessboard

  2 - Darwin Amidst the Spin Doctors

  Biting the Fourth Freudian Bullet

  Can We Finally Complete Darwin’s Revolution?

  3 - Different Parsings, Different Images of Trends

  Fallacies in the Reading and Identification of Trends

  Variation as Universal Reality

  Part Two

  4 - Case One: A Personal Story

  Where any measure of central tendency acts as a harmful abstraction, and variation stands out as the only meaningful reality

  5 - Case Two: Life’s Little Joke

  Genuine changes in central tendency are meaningful, but our failure to consider variation has led to a backwards interpretation: the evolution of horses

  Part Three

  6 - Stating the Problem

  7 - Conventional Explanations

  8 - A Plausibility Argument for General Improvement

  9 - 0.400 Hitting Dies as the Right Tail Shrinks

  10 - Why the Death of 0.400 Hitting Records Improvement of Play

  11 - A Philosophical Conclusion

  Part Four

  12 - The Bare Bones of Natural Selection

  13 - A Preliminary Example at Smallest Scale, with Some Generalities on the Evolution of Body Size

  14 - The Power of the Modal Bacter, or Why the Tail Can’t Wag the Dog

  An Epitome of the Argument

  The Multifariousness of the Modal Bacter

  No Driving to the Right Tail

  A Note on the Fatal Weakness of the Last Straw

  15 - An Epilog on Human Culture

  Bibliography

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  For Rhonda,

  who is the embodiment of excellence

  Das Ewig — Weibliche

  zieht uns hinan

  Praise for FULL HOUSE

  "Stephen Jay Gould uses a lifetime obsession with baseball, a close call with cancer, and an enormous knowledge of the history of life to build a case that links sport, disease, statistics, and evolution into a seamless narrative and ... he does so brilliantly.... Full House breaks new ground in combining exemplary popular science with a new insight into the nature of evolution.... For the first time in the history of science writing, he succeeds in making statistics interesting."

  —New York Review of Books

  "A marvelously erudite and entertaining tour of evolution’s dazzling diversity and richness... an experience ordinarily available only to the lucky few admitted to [Dr. Gould’s] Harvard classes."

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  "The details of Mr. Gould’s arguments continue to offer characteristic delights."

  —New York Times Book Review

  "Stephen Jay Gould is a superb science teacher, in full command of his subject and possessed of a rhetorical manner so delightfully ebullient it’s irresistible."

  —New York Newsday

  "From baseball to biology, this book covers a lot of territory. The thesis is engaging and important.... Full House illuminates so many areas and offers such ample evidence that it has the feel of the definitive about it."

  —Atlanta Journal

  "Stephen Jay Gould may be the most readable science writer today, a splendid explainer of things that, in the hands of others, are too often incomprehensible.... This is ingeniousness and, to use Gould’s own term, truly superb."

  —Newark Sunday Star-Ledger

  "Insightful ... his ideas are important."

  —Library Journal

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint or adapt the following:

  FIGURE 1A

  "Ideal Landscape of the Silurian Period," from Louis Figuier, Earth Before the Deluge, 1863.

  Neg. no. 2A22970. Copyright © Jackie Beckett (photograph taken from book). Courtesy Department

  of Library Services, American Museum of Natural History.

  FIGURE 1B

  "Ideal Scene of the Lias with Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus," from Louis Figuier,

  Earth Before the Deluge, 1863. Neg. no. 2A22971. Copyright © Jackie Beckett (photograph taken from

  book). Courtesy Department of Library Services, American Museum of Natural History.

  FIGURE 1C

  "Fantastic, Scorpionlike Eurypterids, Some Eight Feet Long, Spent Most of Their Time Half Buried

  in Mud," by Charles R. Knight. Courtesy of the National Geographic Society Image Collection.

  FIGURE 1D

  "Mosasaurus Ruled the Waves When They Rolled Over Western Kansas,"

  by Charles R. Knight. Courtesy of the National Geographic Society Image Collection.

  FIGURE 1E

  "Pterygotus and Eurypterus," by Zdemek Burian, from Prehistoric Animals, edited by Joseph

  Augusta. Neg. no. 338586. Copyright © 1996 by Jackie Beckett. Courtesy Department of Library

  Services, American Museum of Natural History.

  FIGURE IF

  "Elasmosaurus," by Zdemek Burian, from Prehistoric Animals, edited by Joseph Augusta. Neg.

  no. 338585. Copyright © 1996 by Jackie Beckett. Courtesy Department of Library Services,

  American Museum of Natural History.

  FIGURES 2A, 2B

  Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster from The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck.

  Copyright © 1978 by M. Scott Peck.

  FIGURE 8

  "Genealogy of the Horse," by O. C. Marsh. Originally appeared in American Journal of Science, 1879.

  Neg. no. 123823. Courtesy Department of Library Services, American Museum of Natural History.

  FIGURE 9

  "The Evolution of the Horse," by W. D. Matthew. Appeared in Quarterly Review of Biology,

  1926. Neg. no. 37969. Copyright © by Irving Dutcher. Courtesy Department of Library Services,

  American Museum of Natural History.

  FIGURES 10, 11

  From "Explosive Speciation at the Base of the Adaptive Radiation of Miocene Grazing Horses,"

  by Bruce MacFadden and Richard Hulbert, Jr. Copyright © 1988 by Macmillan Magazines Ltd.

  From Nature, 336:6198, 1988, 466-68. Reprinted with permission from

  Nature, Macmillan Magazines Limited.

  FIGURES 14, 19

  Adapted from illustrations by Philip Simone in "Entropic Homogeneity Isn’t Why No One Hits

  .400 Any More," by Stephen Jay Gould. Discover, August 1986, 60-66. Adapted with permission

  of Discover.

  FIGURE 15

  Adapted from an illustration by Cathy Hall in "Losing the Edge: The Extinction of the .400 Hitter."

  Vanity Fair, March 1983, 264-78. Adapted with permission of Vanity Fair.

  FIGURES 16, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27

  Adapted from "Presidential Address," by Stephen Jay Gould. Copyright © 1988 by

  Stephen Jay Gould. Journal of Paleontology, 62:3, 1988, 320-24. Adapted with permission of

  Journal of Paleontology:

  FIGURE 17

  Adapted from The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. Copyright © 1986 by Bill James.

  New York: Villard Books, 1986. Adapted with permission of the Darhansoff & Verrill Literary

  Agency on behalf of the author.

  FIGURE 18

  Reprinted by permission of Sangit Chatterjee.

  FIGURE 26

  Adapted from "Causality and Cope’s Rule: Evidence from the Planktonic Foraminifera,"

  by A. J. Arnold, D. C. Kelly, and W. C. Parker. Journal of Paleon
tology, 69:2, 1995, 204.

  Adapted with permission of Journal of Paleontology.

  FIGURES 28, 29

  Adapted from illustrations by David Starwood, from "The Evolution of Life on the Earth," by

  Stephen Jay Gould. Scientific American, October 1994, 86. Copyright © 1994 by Scientific American.

  All rights reserved.

  FIGURE 30

  "Modern Stromatolites." Copyright © by François Gohier.

  Reprinted by permission of Photo Researchers, Inc.

  FIGURE 31

  Adapted from "Universal Phylogenetic Tree in Rooted Form." Copyright © 1994 by Carl R. Woese.

  Microbiological Reviews, 58, 1994, 1-9. Adapted with permission of the author.

  FIGURE 32

  Adapted from "Evolutionary Change in the Morphological Complexity of the

  Mammalian Vertebral Column." Copyright © 1993 by Donald W. McShea. Evolution, 47, 1993,

  730-40. Adapted with permission of the author.

  FIGURES 33, 34

  Adapted from "Mechanisms of Large-Scale Evolutionary Trends." Copyright © 1994 by Donald W.

  McShea. Evolution, 48, 1994, 1747-63. Adapted with permission of the author.

  FIGURE 35

  Reprinted by permission of George Boyajian.

  FIGURE 36

  Adapted from "Taxonomic Longetivity of Fossil Ammonoid," from an article by George Boyajian, in

  Geology, 20, 1992, 983-986. Adapted by permission of Geology.

  A Modest Proposal

  In an old literary theme, from Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son to Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, our most beloved child is often the most problematic and misunderstood among our offspring. I worry for Full House, my adored and wayward boy. I have nurtured this short book for fifteen years through three distinctly different roots (and routes): (1) an insight about the nature of evolutionary trends that popped into my head one day, revised my personal thinking about the history of life, and emerged in technical form as a presidential address for the Paleontological Society in 1988; (2) a statistical eureka that brought me much hope and comfort during a life-threatening illness (see chapter 4); and (3) an explanation that, once conceptualized, struck me as self-evident and necessarily correct, but also diametrically opposed to all traditional accounts, for a major puzzle of American popular culture—the disappearance of 0.400 hitting in baseball.

  All three roots arose from a common insight in the form most personally exciting to intellectuals—the eureka or a-ha! moment that inverts an old way of seeing and renders both clear and coordinated something that had been muddy, inchoate, or unformulated before. (I speak of a deeply personal experience, not a claim full of hubris about absolutes. Such eurekas only remove scales from one’s own eyes and break idiosyncratic impediments. The rest of the world may always have known what you just discovered. But then, some eurekas are more generally novel.) My insight made me view trends in an entirely different way: as changes in variation within complete systems, rather than as "a thing moving either up or down" (hence the subtitle of this book, The Spread of Excellence).

  With insight came fear—and for two reasons. First, the theme may seem small and offbeat at first. Why should a different explanation of trends become a subject of general interest? Moreover, and second, the key reformulation (thinking of whole systems expanding or contracting, rather than entities on the move) is fundamentally statistical and must be presented in graphical terms. I did not fear for incomprehensibility. The key idea is as simple as could be (a conceptual inversion, not an arcane mathematical expression), and I knew that I could present the argument entirely in pictorial (not algebraic) terms. But I also knew that I would have to lay out the argument carefully, first making the general point and then developing some simple and preliminary examples before taking on the two main subjects: 0.400 hitting and a resolution of the problem of progress in the history of life.

  But would people read the book? Would readers persist through the necessary preliminaries to reach the key reformulations? Would they maintain interest through a graphical development, given our cultural disinclination toward anything that smacks of mathematical style? Yet, I remain convinced that this book presents a novel argument of broad applicability—and that persistent readers may emerge with satisfaction, and in agreement with the father as he pardoned his prodigal son (and justified mercy to his other, persistently obedient child): "it was meet that we should make merry and be glad."

  So let me make a deal with you. As a man who has spent many enlightening, if unenriching, hours playing poker (hence the book’s title), I want to propose a bet. Persist through to the end, and I wager that you will be rewarded (perhaps even with a royal flush to beat my full house). In return, I have made the book short (remarkably so compared with my other effusions), hopefully clear and entertaining (if methodical in building up to the two main examples), and imbued with a promise that two truly puzzling, important, and apparently unrelated phenomena can be explained by the conceptual apparatus here developed.

  The rewards of persistence should be twofold. First, I think that my approach of studying variation in complete systems does provide genuine resolution for two widely discussed issues that can only remain confusing and incoherent when studied in the traditional, persistently Platonic mode of representing full systems by a single essence or exemplar—and then studying how this entity moves through time. I find both resolutions particularly satisfying because they are not so radical that they lie outside easy conceivability. Rather, both solutions make eminent good sense and resolve true paradoxes of the conventional view, once you imbibe the revised perspective based on variation. How can we believe, as the traditional approach requires, that 0.400 hitting has disappeared because batters have gotten worse, when record performances have improved in almost any athletic activity? My approach shows that the disappearance of 0.400 hitting actually records the increasing excellence of play in baseball—and this makes satisfying sense (but cannot be coherently grasped at all under traditional modes of thought about the problem).

  Similarly, although I can marshal an impressive array of arguments, both theoretical (the nature of the Darwinian mechanism) and factual (the overwhelming predominance of bacteria among living creatures), for denying that progress characterizes the history of life as a whole, or even represents an orienting force in evolution at all-still, and if only for legitimate parochial reasons, we rightly embrace the idea that humans are uniquely complex, and we properly insist that this fact requires some acknowledgment of a trend. But the explanatory apparatus of Full House permits us to retain this commonsensical view about human status, while understanding that progress truly does not pervade or even meaningfully mark the history of life.

  Second—and I don’t quite know how to say this without sounding more immodest than I truly intend to be—this book does have broader ambitions, for the central argument of Full House does make a claim about the nature of reality. I say nothing that has not been stated before by other folks in other ways, but I do try to explicate a broad range of cases not usually gathered together, and I am making my plea by gentle example, rather than by tendentious frontal assault in the empyrean realm of philosophical abstraction (the usual way to attack the nature of reality, and to guarantee limited attention for want of anchoring). I am asking my readers finally and truly to cash out the deepest meaning of the Darwinian revolution and to view natural reality as composed of varying individuals in populations—that is, to understand variation itself as irreducible, as "real" in the sense of "what the world is made of." To do this, we must abandon a habit of thought as old as Plato and recognize the central fallacy in our tendency to depict populations either as average values (usually conceived as "typical" and therefore representing the abstract essence or type of the system) or as extreme examples (singled out for special worthiness, like 0.400 hitting or human complexity). The subtitle of this book—The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin—epitomiz
es the two approaches, and the importance of owning Darwin’s solution.

  Full House is a companion volume of sorts to my earlier book Wonderful Life (1989). Together, they present an integrated and unconventional view of life’s history and meaning—one that forces us to reconceptualize our notion of human status within this history. Wonderful Life asserts the unpredictability and contingency of any particular event in evolution— and emphasizes that the origin of Homo sapiens must be viewed as such an unrepeatable particular, not an expected consequence. Full House presents the general argument for denying that progress defines the history of life or even exists as a general trend at all. Within such a view of life-as-a-whole, humans can occupy no preferred status as a pinnacle or culmination. Life has always been dominated by its bacterial mode.

  Both volumes present their basic arguments through particular examples (of an arresting sort), rather than by tendentious generalities—the full range of the Cambrian explosion as revealed in the fauna of the Burgess Shale in Wonderful Life; the disappearance of 0.400 hitting in baseball, and the constant bacterial mode of life’s bell curve in Full House. These cases suggest that we trade the traditional source of human solace in separation for a more interesting view of life in union with other creatures as one contingent element of a much larger history. We must give up a conventional notion of human dominion, but we learn to cherish particulars, of which we are but one (Wonderful Life), and to revel in complete ranges, to which we contribute one precious point (Full House)—a good swap, I would argue, of stale (and false) comfort for broader understanding. It is, indeed, a wonderful life within the full house of our planet’s history of organic diversity.

  So you have my modest proposal. Please read this book. Then let’s talk, and have a whale of an argument about all manner of deepest things— and of cabbages, and kings.