[ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals)

[Anders Sandberg]

I do recommend Charles Murray's "Human Accomplishment" for looking at 
the distribution of excellence. The main finding seems to be that genius 
cluster in time and space: partially because certain conditions might 
enable it, but also because bright people seek out each other or 
stimulate each other. I think the only strongly ethnic result is that 
jews are very overrepresented among the highest achievers.

The renaissance was probably a confluence of several factors: the 
economic rebound from the black death and malaise of the 14th century, 
the existence of suitably splintered states, the influx of Greek 
learning via fleeing Byzantine scholars, as well as the spread of 
humanistic memes that allowed breaks from tradition. But once enabled, 
what actually caused the flowering and clustering of genius is harder to 
tell. It was one of the rare explosions of creativity, one that we are 
still in many ways processing.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University