Charles Murray is stirring up trouble again. Emily Eakin reports in Murray, the conservative co-author of 1) “Europeans and North Americans account for 97 percent of scientific accomplishment,” 2) While Europe has been the overwhelmingly dominant influence on human achievement — 3) The most influential scientist ever is Newton, followed by Galileo and Aristotle. Then in a “For literature, philosophy and visual art,” Eakin writes, “Murray decided that unbaised global Any listing like this is bound to be questioned. But when it lays claim to qualitative accuracy Murray’s top 20 literary giants include Petrarch, but no Plato or Lucretius; Euripedes, but no Schiller makes the list but not Freud or Thomas Mann; Boccaccio make the list along with Charles Murray is stirring up trouble again. Emily Eakin reports in “A Cultural Scorecard Says West Is Ahead” that he says it’s not his intention. “But his record is hard to ignore.” Murray, the conservative co-author of “The Bell Curve,” which put the civilized world in an uproar when it professed that whites were smarter than blacks due to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-425","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-6R","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nhe says it’s not his intention. “But his record is hard to ignore.” <\/P>
\n
\nwhich put the civilized world in an uproar when it professed that whites were
\nsmarter than blacks due to differences in hereditary IQ, now claims in another wicked
\nbook,
\n800 B.C. to 1950,”<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> that:<\/P>
\n
\nEakin notes, based on his inventory of “eight fields — astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth
\nsciences, physics, mathematics, medicine and technology — as well as a combined index ranking
\nscientists from all disciplines.”<\/P>
\n
\nas measured by the relative amount of space given in 34 standard reference works in four
\nlanguages to 4,002 significant people in the arts and sciences — the European heyday of great
\naccomplishment is over.<\/P>
\n
\nsteep drop come Kepler, Lavoisier, Descartes, Huygens and Laplace, followed by Einstein (ninth
\non the list), Faraday, Pasteur and Ptolemy. Darwin doesn’t show up until 17th, after Hooke,
\nLeibniz, Rutherford and Euler. Finally, Berzelius, Euclid and Maxwell round out the top 20.<\/P>
\n
\ninventories were not feasible: the references works were too skewed toward their national
\ntraditions. So he created separate indexes by culture instead.”
But if you think the
\nscientific list is peculiar, perhaps not so much in makeup as in sequence, the list for the giants of
\nWestern literature will amaze you. Shakespeare comes out first, no surprise. But Goethe ranks
\nsecond, ahead of Dante (third), Virgil (fourth) and Homer (fifth). There is no Cervantes, no Saint
\nAugustine and no Saint Thomas Aquinas, to whose humanist influence on Christianity Murray
\nhimself attributes Western dominance.<\/P>
\n
\nbased on a statistical method open to doubt — Eakins quotes several historians and scholars on its
\nbiases and value judgments — it seems a fool’s errand. <\/P>
\n
\nAeschylus or Sophocles and no Aristophanes; Byron, but no Wordsworth or Keats, and no
\nChaucer or Milton; it includes Rousseau, Voltaire, Moliere, Racine and Victor Hugo, but not
\nMontaigne, Balzac, Baudelaire, Stendahl, Flaubert or Proust; Sir Walter Scott but not Jonathan
\nSwift or Jane Austen; Virgil and Horace but not Ovid. <\/P>
\n
\nTolstoy and Dostoevsky; but there’s no Pushkin; Ibsen makes the list but not Chekov; there’s no
\nKierkegaard or Nietzsche, Orwell or Joyce, Twain or Faulkner. And what of Yeats or Blake? Not
\nthere.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"