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.