In this section on complexity in the history of life, I shall present something close to a "mirror image" case—an increase in total variation by expansion away from a lower limit, or "left wall," of simplest conceivable form. The cases may seem quite different at first: improvement in baseball as decrease in variation by scrunching up against a right wall of maximal achievement versus increase of variation by spread away from a left wall of minimal complexity, misconstrued as an inevitable, overall march to progress in the history of life.But a vital and deeper similarity unites the two examples—for both represent the same mode of correction for the same kind of error. In both cases, the error involves false portrayal of a complete system of variation by a single "thing" or entity construed as either the average or the best example within the system. Thus we tried to map the changing status of batting through time by tracing the history of the best conceived as a separable entity (0.400 hitters).
