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.