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insects?) The article also expresses surprise that "creatures as far down the evolutionary ladder as sponges can recognize tissue from other species." If our leading professional journal still uses such imagery about evolutionary ladders, why should we laugh at Mr. Mecklenburg for his identical metaphor?
    The allure of this conventional imagery is so great that I have fallen into the trap myself—by presenting my examples as an ascending ladder from the central pop icon of a sports hero, through letters of increasing sophistication, to textbooks, to an article in Science. Yet the last shall be first, and my linear sequence bends into a circle of error, as both my initial and final examples misuse the identical phrase about an "evolutionary ladder." At least the linebacker was trying to be funny!
    These lists of error could go on forever, but let me close this section with two striking examples representing the pinnacle (there we go with progress metaphors again) of fame and achievement in the domains of popular and professional life.
    Popular culture’s leading version: Psychologist M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, first published in 1978, must be the greatest success in the history of our distinctive and immensely popular genre of "how-to" treatises on personal growth. This book has been on the New York Times best-seller list for more than six hundred weeks, placing itself so far in first place for total sales that we need not contemplate any challenge in our lifetime. Peck’s book includes a section titled "The Miracle of Evolution" (pages 263-68).
    Peck begins his discussion with a classic misunderstanding of the second law of thermodynamics:
    The most striking feature of the process of physical evolution is that it is a miracle. Given what we understand of the universe, evolution should not occur; the phenomenon should not exist at all. One of the basic natural laws is the second law of thermodynamics, which states that energy naturally flows from a state of greater organization to a state of lesser organization.... In other words, the universe is in a process of winding down.
    But this statement of the second law, usually portrayed as increase of entropy (or disorder) through time, applies only to closed systems that receive no inputs of new energy from exterior sources. The earth is not a closed system; our planet is continually bathed by massive influxes of solar energy, and earthly order may therefore increase without violating any natural law. (The solar system as a whole may be construed as closed and therefore subject to the second law. Disorder does increase in the entire system as the sun uses up fuel, and will ultimately explode. But this final fate does not preclude a long and local buildup of order in that little corner of totality called the earth.)
    Peck designates evolution as miraculous for violating the second law in displaying a primary thrust toward progress through time:
    The process of evolution has been a development of organisms from lower to higher and higher states of complexity, differentiation, and organization.... [Peck then writes, in turn, about a virus, a bacterium, a paramecium, a sponge, an insect, and a fish—as if this motley order represented an evolutionary sequence. He continues:] And so it goes, up the scale of evolution, a scale of increasing complexity and organization and differentiation, with man who possesses an enormous cerebral cortex and extraordinarily complex behavior patterns, being, as far as we can tell, at the top. I state that the process of evolution is a miracle, because insofar as it is a process of increasing organization and differentiation it runs counter to natural law.
    Peck then summarizes his view as a diagram (redrawn here as Figure 2), a stunning epitome of the grand error that the bias of progress imposes upon us. He recognizes the primary fact of nature that stands so strongly against any simplistic view of progress (and, as I shall show later