Human Accomplishment 620
Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 | |
author | Charles Murray |
pages | 688 |
publisher | HarperCollins |
rating | Thought-provoking |
reviewer | Joel Eidsath |
ISBN | 006019247X |
summary | A statistical history of human accomplishment. |
For our species' resume, you probably would not list to put "Defeated Hitler" as one of humanity's accomplishments, because it sounds too much like 'Beat my Heroin Addiction.' You would want to include things like 'Painted the Roof of the Sistine Chapel' or 'Discovered General Relativity.' In other words, you would want to include examples of human excellence throughout the ages.
Not only has Murray set out to compile this resume, but he sought to do it for a reason that is at the same time both interesting and audacious: once you have compiled a list of the several thousand most important creators and discoverers of all time, you can stick it into a database. The idea is that with this database a person can spot trends in accomplishment; he can identify regions and cities where excellence has clustered; he can evaluate qualities of political systems that spur innovation and those that stifle it. Murray's book is a stunning profusion of graphs and plots that do much more to teach us about accomplishment that most narrative histories.
For this to work, however, Murray first had to tackle the problem of differing opinions on who exactly deserves a place in the database. Everybody's list would differ -- yours, mine, and Charles Murray's. There would be substantial similarities between our lists, to be sure; nobody is going to leave out Newton, Darwin, Goethe, Shakespeare, Confucius, or al-Mutanabbi. But when it comes to lesser achievements, the arguments would be endless. Does Hooke make it into the list of the top 20 physicists of all time, or does Pascal make it into the list of the top 10 mathematicians?
So what Murray has done is to split up accomplishment into a number of fields and tried to take a neutral measure of each person's respective 'eminence' in the field. He measures 'eminence' by taking a number of comprehensive sources on each field and counting the references to each person and how many paragraphs they get. The sources are from as many different languages as possible and Murray does a good job of avoiding the distorting effects of ethnocentrism. He uses sharp cutoff dates at 800 B.C. and 1950 A.D. to limit the data.
What Murray winds up with is a procedurally neutral measure of human accomplishment that is stable when new sources are added or taken away, and also has good face validity. In Medicine, for example, Pasteur is first with an index score of 100, Koch is third with 90 and Freud (for clinical descriptions of mental illnesses) is 18th with a score of 34.
The Lotka Curve
Murray's other major work made a certain kind of statistical curve a household word, and Human Accomplishment prepares a second candidate for improving public statistical awareness: the Lotka Curve. In the mid-1920s, Alfred Lotka noticed an interesting pattern in scientific journals. About 60% of people publish only one article for a journal. The number of people publishing more that this falls off very fast with the number of articles. This makes up a Lotka curve and is almost L shaped.It turns out that in just about every field of human accomplishment significant figures fall along a Lotka curve. In Western literature, Shakespeare is far out along the horizontal part of the curve, Goethe a bit less so, and a whole host of lesser figures make up the nearly vertical part of the data set.
Dead White Males
Despite using several data collection techniques that wind up exaggerating the influence of non-Western cultures, Murray's data shows a strong majority of Westerners among the significant figures of world history.
Fully 97% of significant figures in the sciences come from the West. The same figure is arrived at from looking only at significant events. Even America is dwarfed by European accomplishment in the sciences, hosting less than 20% of significant figures before 1950 compared to Europe's nearly 80%. Europe's dominance over America is even greater in the arts. And though Murray makes sure to calculate what is an upper limit for artistic accomplishment in non-Western parts of the world, the graph is substantially the same as that for the sciences.
One of the astonishing parts of Murray's data is how it demonstrates the significant effects of legal equality. Jewish achievement after 1850 skyrocketed due to their newfound position before the law. Between 1910 and 1950, Jewish achievement tripled despite even the Third Reich and the Holocaust.
The graph of the achievement of woman displays a different pattern, despite their having gained substantial legal equality in the past century. Though there are slight increases in the numbers, women only represent a few percent of Murray's significant figures after 1900. Nor does the data available for the years beyond 1950 bear out any substantial increase in women's achievement during the second half of the twentieth century. Murray provides several possible explanations. Despite legal equality, women did not gain the same degree of immediate social equality that other groups did. Moreover, the substantially greater demands of parenthood upon women make achievement harder.
Decline
The last section of Human Accomplishment is somewhat surprising. When adjusted for population, Murray's numbers show a decline in accomplishment after 1800. When numbers are used that take not only total population in account, but also urban population and educated population, the decline has brought us down to nearly pre-Renaissance levels. For example, we have 65 playwrights alive today for every one in Elizabethan England. Yet do we have dozens of Shakespeares? The picture is even more stark when the 12,000 members of the screen Writers Guild are taken into account.
As a percentage, the number of significant figures in the sciences compared to the total population has dropped a great deal; this is despite a far greater percentage of working scientists and far more science and technical journals being published.
Murray goes through the data and shows why he believes that the decline is real and is not explicable by any procedural artifacts brought about by his methods. It is a somewhat disturbing conclusion to a great work.
You can purchase Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Re:Yeah, Right ... (Score:3, Funny)
Well, I know I wouldn't welcome a resume from a species that basically said: "no noteworthy accomplishments for the past eight centuries; too busy with politically correct infighting."
Human Resume (Score:3, Funny)
Human Race
humanrace@earth.com
Third Planet from Sun
Sol, Milky Way 90210
(555)0000001
MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Sucessful downsizing of pesky animal and plant problem on planet.
Created science, religion, and McDonalds.
Created bureaucracy.
We're the ones sending out 50 year old "I Love Lucy" episodes in space.
Created the atomic bomb.
QUALIFICATIONS
Ability to split everything in to groups, reduce them to superficial views then discriminate.
Can eradicate anything you want in a quick, effeciant manner.
We laugh, we love, we play, we're like sea monkeys except we breathe air.
Terraforming.
Created computers, then made them useful enough to take over the jobs of 80% of our species, smart eh?
EMPLOYMENT HISTORY
Stone Age, Earth: (10KBC - 2000BC)
Mostly went around grunting at eachother.
Occasionaly raped and pillaged another cave.
Created art using feces and cave walls.
Dark Ages, Earth: (500AD- 800AD)
Not too much happened. We did kill off a shitload of our own people cause we lived like pigs and ended up catching the black plauge.
Technology Age, Earth: (1900AD - Current)
Created manned flight, space travel, robotics, computers, cloning and bio terrorism. Job seems risky right now and looking for new oppurtunities before recently created AI becomes new manager.
EDUCATION
Graduated first in class of 1,000,000,000,000 species on planet.
Top 1% of tool using monkeys.
HONORS
Created especially by this God fellow.
One human, please (Score:3, Funny)
Tastes great with ketchup...
No good (Score:2, Funny)
While the Human Race's resume is certainly impressive, without an MCSE we cannot accept it for this position. Best of luck in your future endeavours.
Re:Yeah, Right ... (Score:2, Funny)
Exactly! Everyone should realize it's just that 64-bit computers didn't exist before the G5 came along!
Ranking and Eminence (Score:1, Funny)
He measures 'eminence' by taking a number of comprehensive sources on each field and counting the references to each person and how many paragraphs they get.
Translation: "The author used Google to look up his stats."
Re:2 reasons for the West's dominance (Score:4, Funny)
This is not a flame, by the way -- I in no way am suggesting you would agree with any other fascist ideas.
Yes, I do realize it. Mussolini had some interesting ideas, but failed to impliment them very well. In reality, it is easy to identify the problem of modernity. It is much more difficult to find a reasonable solution.
And, no need to apologize. I admit that I am a fascist, in that I believe in the leadership principle, cultural standards, and I disagree with egalitarianism.
Out of curiosity, what would your `third path' be? How would your antimaterialist order work? Is it simply traditional conservatism (of the throne-and-altar type), or something different?
I believe in a system of social organization similar to that of Plato's Republic. It involves a hierarchical social structure based on philosophical education and eugenics. The best must be allowed to lead, not because they are popular or powerful, but because they are the most wise and the most excellent. The right to rule wouldn't come from God or popularity, but ethical superiority. This wouldn't be a dictatorship per se, but a new kind of aristocracy. Democracy and popular elections, along with the media structure which maintains such a system, must end however. Especially when the democracy is clearly a fraud, what advocate is simply honesty, and a leadership driven by clear ideals.
Further, any political system of class warfare must end. The purpose of the state is to facillitate class cooperation for the betterment of all. Artisans need to be allowed to flourish , and only when they are not treated as second class citizens can cultural art truly exist again. In some cases, it will be difficult. There are few stonemasons left in this world, but that is one trade I want to see improve. The economic system I advocate is very close to that suggested by the Green Party, which I look at as something of an intermediate step to a fully idealistic state. Without cultural unity or standards however, none of it matters.
As far as cultural renewal, this would be done on a local scale. Each culture should be allowed to thrive and exclude that which does not conform with its culture. In the US, after years of cosmopolitanism, this would very difficult... but I believe it could happen. It would probably be less like an actual state, and more like seperate districts within a state. You could even create a zone for the so called non-conformists where they could non-conform with each other, but visit other unified cities when it suits them.
Another important aspect of the future leaders would be the furthering and appraising of technological innovations. Technology is changing the world far more quickly than current bureaucratic governments can react. A prime role of the future leaders would be to ensure that technology is not abused, both in ways which harm people or the environment. Society must be careful that technological innovation does not weaken our people by reducing the impact of natural selection, thus eugenics is a necessary part of this future society.
I also believe that the warrior ethic should be a major part of this future society. Military service should be mandatory, and combat training should be a part of life from a very young age. In addition to standard militarism, a return to dualing as a legal means of conflict resolution would be beneficial.
Life should be centered around ordered art, combat, honorable behavior, personal excellence, technological innovation, and exploring the unknown.
thats all I can think of at the moment...