SOURCE: Barr, Stephen M. “Mismeasure of Man.” Public Interest 127 (spring 1997): 120-23.

In the following review of Full House, Barr argues that, contrary to Gould's suppositions about complexity and the “success” of a species, “it is quite doubtful that proliferation of species is a sign of success.”

Stephen Jay Gould's latest book, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, is a grab-bag of miscellany—his successful struggle with cancer, the disappearance of the.400 hitter in baseball, Plato's theory of ideas, the history of life on earth. Somehow though he manages to weave all of this together into a grand philosophical synthesis about the meaning of life and the nature of reality.

The root of much evil in the world, according to Gould, lies in the simple statistic called “the average,” or at least in the confusions that it engenders in the popular mind. One average in...