Few would question the truism that humankind is the crowning achievement of evolution; that the defining thrust of life's history yields, progress-over time from the primitive and simple to the more advanced and complex; that the disappearance of 400 hitting in baseball is a fact to be bemoaned; or that identifying an existing trend can be helpful in making important life decisions. Few, that is, except Stephen Jay Gould, who, in Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, proves that all of these intuitive truths are, in fact, wrong.