| Gould explains how these increasingly complex organisms are just one end of the complexity distribution, and why looking only at them misses the entire picture—the "full house" | - by Michael Shermer, Los Angeles Times• In the first example, Gould explains that the decline of the top batting average does not imply that there has been a decline in the skill of baseball players |
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| One misconception people often have is focusing too narrowly on averages or extreme values rather than the full spectrum of variation in the entire system what Gould calls the "full house" of variation | - by Luis Rocha, Cybernetics and Human Knowing• - by Michael Shermer, Los Angeles Times• - by David Papineau, New York Times• - by Mark Jaffe, Chicago Tribune• Summary [ ] Full House aims to explain to the general reader how misconceptions about statistics can lead people to misunderstand the role variation plays in driving trends in complex systems |
- by Richard York and Brett Clark, Monthly Review• - by Thomas Dietz, Contemporary Human Ecology• - by John Allen Paulos, Washington Post• G6593 1996 Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin is a 1996 book by.
| , "bacteria, fern, dinosaurs, dog, man" | The book focuses on two main examples of this misconception: the disappearance of the 0 |
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| 400 in baseball, and the perceived tendency of towards "progress" making organisms more complex and sophisticated | - from Publishers Weekly See also [ ]• Those who believe in evolution's drive towards progress often demonstrate it with a series of organisms that appeared in different eons, with increasing complexity, e |
In the second example, Gould points out that many people wrongly believe that the process of evolution has a preferred direction—a tendency to make organisms more complex and more sophisticated as time goes by.