Gould Steven Jay. The full house: the spread of excellence from Plato to Darwin

New York: Harmony Books, 1996. — 178 p.A Modest Proposal.
How Shall We Read and Spot a Trend?
Huxley's Chessboard.
Darwin Amidst the Spin Doctors.
Biting the Fourth Freudian Bullet.
Can We Finally Complete Darwin's Revolution?
Different Parsings, Different Images of Trends.
Fallacies in the Reading and Identification of Trends.
Variation as Universal Reality.
Death and Horses: Two Cases for the Primacy of Variation.
Case One: A Personal Story.
Case Two: Life's Little Joke.
The Model Batter: Extinction of 0.400 Hitting and the Improvement of.
Baseball.
Stating the Problem.
Conventional Explanations.
A Plausibility Argument for General Improvement.
0.400 Hitting Dies as the Right Tail Shrinks.
Why the Death of 0.400 Hitting Records Improvement of Play.
A Philosophical Conclusion.
The Modal Bacter: Why Progress Does Not Rule the History of Life.
The Bare Bones of Natural Selection.
A Preliminary Example at Smallest Scale, with Some Generalities on the Evolution of Body Size.
The Power of the Modal Bacter, or Why the Tail Can't Wag the Dog.
An Epitome of the Argument.
The Multifariousness of the Modal Bacter.
No Driving to the Right Tail.
A Note on the Fatal Weakness of the Last Straw.
An Epilog on Human Culture.