In Full House, Gould corrects the prevalent, anthropocentric view of the world with an eloquent argument for a new paradigm of progress in which variety - not complexity - is the true measure of excellence. In the process, Full House teaches us how to read trends as changes in variation within full systems, rather than as "things moving somehwere".
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. - Wikipedia