Contents
A Modest Proposal
Part One: How Shall we Read and Spot a Trend?
1. A Huxley's Chessboard
2. Darwins Amidst the Spin Doctors
3. Different Parsings, Different Images of Trends
Part Two: Death and Horses: Two Cases for the Primacy of Variation
4. Case One: A Personal Story
5. Case Two: Life's Little Joke
Part Three: The Model Batter: Extinction of 0.400 Hitting and the Improvement of Baseball
6. Stating the Problem
7. Conventional Explanations
8. A Plausibility Argument for General Improvement
9. 0.400 Hitting Dies as the Right Tail Shrinks
10. Why the Death of 0.400 Hitting Records Improvement of Play
11. A Phlisophical Conclusion
Part Four: The Modal Bacter: Why Progress Does not Rule the History of Life
12. The Bare bones of Natural Selection
13. A Preliminary Example at Smallest Scale, with Some Generalities on the Evolution of Body Size
14. The Power of the Modal Bacter, or Why the tail Can't Wag the Dog
15. An Epilog on Human Culture
Bibliography
Index