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 | - by Thomas Dietz, Contemporary Human Ecology• 400 in baseball, and the perceived tendency of towards "progress" making organisms more complex and sophisticated |
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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 | It was released in the United Kingdom as Life's Grandeur, with the same subtitle and with an additional eight-page introduction entitled "A Baseball Primer for British Readers" |
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.
10In 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 | Publication date 1996 Media type Print, e-book Pages 244 pp |
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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" | He explains that by any measure, the most common organisms have always been, and still are, the bacteria |
- by Michael Shermer, Los Angeles Times• - by John Allen Paulos, Washington Post• - by Jeremy Manier, Chicago Tribune• - by , Reprinted in Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003 | |
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