Full House

The theme of this book is that any ability should never be mentioned by its best performers, but rather by the variation within the group and its closeness to the abilities upper and lower limits. For such dry material, Gould does and excellent job presenting by using baseball as an interesting example of his principles. He goes on to say that because of all this, we cannot say that there is any notion of progress in nature. He then says that human cultural evolution does. To me this kinda shows that if life is destined to have a right tail that leads towards complexity, at some point a species will develop that has the ability of consciousness. This species will then go on to redefine the limits of life as a cultural complexity and a new round of evolution will begin. I guess he would argue that there is no guarantee that we would necessarily reach the stage of consciousness....it's hard for me to see what else we would reach at apogee of complexity in a biologial sense. I personally think that the book suffered from too much evidence and too many examples, but I guess his ideas wouldn't be quite so credible without all of it. The best part of the book is the epilogue and is worth reading. I like his ideas, it seems that they're applicable everytime you try to characterize a trend of performance.

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