Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin

Few would question that humankind is the crowning achievement of evolution-that history yields progress over time from the primitive and simple to the more advanced and complex-or that identifying an existing trend can be helpful in making important life decisions. We have always identified trends as bad or good. But Stephen Jay Gould argues that this mode of interpretation is a bias that needs correcting. In Full House, Gould presents the truth about progress, evolution, and excellence, as...