Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin
Steven J. Gould
"Full House is a book about understanding variations. The whole idea I think that was really interesting about the book is that it really flipped evolution on its head in that I think many think many people view evolution as some sort of progression to a higher state. His view on evolution isn't a progression to a higher state but is simply a random walk, if you will, a random variation off of the main theme of life, which is bacteria.
The interesting thing about the book is that he united bacteria and baseball. It all had to do with this idea of variation. In baseball we see a lack of variation because the quality of play has gotten better, and that's why we don't see baseball hitters hitting 400. With regard to evolution or the study of evolution, what we see is that life is random, life continues to evolve, but it really all bounces off, it all starts off and maybe will return to bacteria. So there's a lot of variation to life, but it doesn't necessarily mean that's evolving to a higher state.
I think this book would be a little bit difficult for somebody to read who does not have a biology background. In fact, I found myself kind of not paying that much attention to that part of the book; but I thought that the baseball part of the book more than made up for it. I would give this book four stars."
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