1 Where is the Progress ?

“Full House” is undoubtedly about the misunderstanding of variation in different systems. In this sense, it follows a systems-theoretic discourse relevant to many areas of human activity – how else would it be possible to discuss baseball and evolution together so persuasively? But Gould’s aim is above all to discredit the concept of “progress” in biological evolution, which he does by discussing strong evidence that such a concept derives from a short-sighted look at the whole scope of variation observed in the records of natural history. This myopic understanding of biological evidence, he proposes, stems from our desire to retain a sense of specialness in the universe after the revolutions initiated by Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Freud.