Full House: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin

Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin is a book by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, published in 1996. It was released in the UK as Life's Grandeur, with the same subtitle. In Full House, Gould demonstrates how one type of statistical misconception leads to misunderstanding of important phenomena. The misconception is paying attention only to the "high score" or extreme value, when a continuous distribution of values exists (what Gould calls a "full house") and is what actually drives the phenomena. The book focuses on two main examples of this misconception: the disappearance of the 0.400 batting average in baseball, and the perceived tendency of evolution towards "progress" making organisms more complex and sophisticated. 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. Quite the contrary: he shows that all that has happened is that the... full article at wikipedia