Full House
The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin
by Stephen Jay Gould · first published 1996
60% recommend40% neutral
In Full House, Gould corrects the prevalent, anthropocentric view of the world with an eloquent argument for a new paradigm of progress in which variety - not complexity - is the true measure of excellence. In the process, Full House teaches us how to read trends as changes in variation within full systems, rather than as "things moving somehwere".
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Full House - The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, by Stephen Jay Gould Evolution of horses, disappearance of the .400 in baseball, where are all the modern Geniuses, and the most integral part- the dominance…
on “Ask HN: Life Changing Books?” ↗Pretty old but I read them for the first time in 2019: Microcosmos by Lynn Margulis and Full House by Stephen Jay Gould. Both of them really blew me away and changed my worldview. I also started on The Vital Question by Nick Lane but haven't finished it yet. But I would recommend anyways based on…
on “Ask HN: Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2019?” ↗Anything from Sagan: Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God could convert the Pope to agnosticism. Stephen Ray Gould: Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin: will both challenge every preconceived notion you've had, link seemingly impossibly unrelated phenomenon together using similar models and patterns, and…
on “Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?” ↗…interred in the mind of Maxwell's demon. This is our human bias favoring the common myth of ever-expanding complexity is an "inevitable" result of the passage of time; refer to Stephen Jay Gould's "Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin"[0] for the only palatable refute modern evolutionists can offer. >When taking into account the possible transitive benefits of knowledge organized via…
on “Where is Noether's principle in machine learning?” ↗Good point. Mean performance, that is used to compare countries, may rise while variance shrinks resulting in fewer if any extremely high and low performers. Reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould's book "Full House".
on “The secret of Finland's stellar schools” ↗Stephen Gould wrote a whole book disputing this idea that the complexity of life increases: "Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin." The basic argument is that almost all life on Earth is still prokaryotic...the rest of us are just a rounding error. He wrote several books about how evolution…
on “Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?” ↗