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Human Accomplishment : The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

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Once a decade, Charles Murray drops a bombshell book on American intellectual life.

In 1984, it was his devastating assessment of welfare programs, "Losing Ground," which helped inspire the famous 1996 welfare reform act.

In 1994, Murray coauthored with the late Richard J. Herrnstein the enormous bestseller "The Bell Curve." It ignited controversy by arguing that IQ scores are one of the most overlooked tools for understanding how American society is structured.

Now, after a half-decade of work, Murray, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, is back with another massive book, 688 pages full of graphs and tables. "Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950" (HarperCollins, $29.95) is a fascinating attempt to rank the 4,000 most important artists and scientists in human history.

Murray meticulously measured how much attention the leading scholars in their fields pay to the top creators and discoverers. Reading "Human Accomplishment" is a little like browsing through the statistics-laden "Baseball Encyclopedia," except that instead of being about Ruth, Di Maggio, and Bonds, Murray's book is about Picasso, Darwin, and Edison.

Murray took some time to discuss "Human Accomplishment" with me.

Q. Who came out on top of big categories like Western Literature, Western Art, Western Philosophy, and Combined Sciences?

A. Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aristotle, and Newton -- the people you'd expect.

In Western music, Mozart and Beethoven were in a dead heat, with Bach third. A rather vocal minority is upset about Bach not being on top. I'm not. I love Bach, but it's awfully hard to listen to Beethoven's later symphonies and string quartets and figure out how anybody could possibly be ranked above him.

However, let me stress: I'm not the one who made those decisions. And occasionally I had to grin and bear it when things didn't come out according to my druthers. Rousseau and Byron are way too high in Western literature for my taste, for example.

Q. Can you truly quantify objectively which artists and scientists were the most eminent?

A. Sure. It's one of the most well-developed quantitative measures in the social sciences. (The measurement of intelligence is one of its few competitors, incidentally.)

My indices have a statistical reliability that is phenomenal for the social sciences. There's also a very high "face validity" -- in other words, the rankings broadly correspond to common-sense expectations.

Q. Who was the most accomplished person who ever lived?

A. Now we're talking personal opinion, because the methods I used don't work across domains, but I have an emphatic opinion.

Aristotle.

He more or less invented logic, which was of pivotal importance in human history (and no other civilization ever came up with it independently). He wrote the essay on ethics ("Nicomachean Ethics") that to my mind contains the bedrock truths about the nature of living a satisfying human life. He made huge contributions to aesthetics, political theory, methods of classification and scientific observation. Who else even comes close?

Q. Which woman scored the highest?

A. Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the novel "The Tale of Genji" a thousand years ago, has by far the highest index score -- 86 on a scale of 1 to 100. But, that is in competition just with other Japanese authors, not all of the world's authors.

The highest-scoring woman in any of the sciences -- no surprise -- is Marie Curie in Physics, with a score in the 40s (on a scale where Newton and Einstein are tied at 100). The highest in Western Literature is Virginia Woolf. None of the highest-scoring women in the other categories are major figures.

Q. You pay a surprising amount of attention to Asian culture. Does that stem from the six years you lived in Asia beginning as a Peace Corps volunteer?

A. Put it this way: There are aspects of Asian culture as it is lived that I still prefer to Western culture, 30 years after I last lived in Thailand. Two of my children are half-Asian. Apart from those personal aspects, I have always thought that the Chinese and Japanese civilizations had elements that represented the apex of human accomplishment in certain domains.

When I began the book, I actually hoped to give Asian accomplishment a still larger place than it wound up getting.

Q. You argue that one big reason that most of humanity's highest achievers came from what used to be called Christendom was ... Christianity. Did you expect to reach that conclusion?

A. Michael Novak foretold I would come to that conclusion, but I didn't agree at the time. I didn't think you needed anything except the Greek heritage and some secular social and economic trends to explain the Renaissance.

On this score, I have plenty of witnesses in the form of my colleagues who were getting nervous as the years went by. They kept asking me what the thesis of the book was, and I kept saying, "Beats the hell out of me."

The last chapters of the book were all written in the last nine months of work, and at the beginning of those nine months, I still didn't know what was going to be in them.

Q. You found that per capita levels of accomplishment tended to decline from 1850 to 1950. Would you care to speculate on post-1950 trends?

A. I think that the number of novels, songs, and paintings done since 1950 that anyone will still care about 200 years from now is somewhere in the vicinity of zero. Not exactly zero, but close. I find a good way to make this point is to ask anyone who disagrees with me to name a work that will survive -- and then ask, "Seriously?" Very few works indeed can defend themselves against the "Seriously?" question.

Charles Murray presents three questions in this book. First, can historiometric techniques be used to produce a survey of human accomplishment in the arts and sciences over time and across cultures? Second, are there any obvious patterns in the data? And third, why are those patterns present?

The answer to the first question is certainly "yes". Murray uses the extent of coverage of scientists and artists in standard reference works on each field that he investigates. Basically he counts the number of times figures are mentioned and the amount of space their work is given. He makes a heroic effort to ensure that the results are not skewed by reliance on single works or works in a single language. His inventories include: astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, physics, mathematics, medicine, technology, Chinese philosophy, Indian philosophy, western philosophy, western music, Chinese painting, Japanese art, western art, Arabic literature, Chinese literature, Indian literature, Japanese literature, and western literature.

While many may deride this methodology as bunk, the surprising thing is that the listings "look right". Who will argue that Galileo and Kepler do not belong at the top of the astronomy list, that Newton and Einstein do not belong at the top in physics, or that Shakespeare and Goethe should be lower on the western literature list? We may quibble about minor differences in rankings, but few would assert that obviously significant figures have been completely misplaced. Some readers with extensive statistics backgrounds may attack the techniques used, especially those used later in the book in determining rates of accomplishment, but with my limited background (one year of undergraduate statistics courses at MIT, and a semester of statistics for research in grad school) Murray's methodology looks bulletproof.

To this point, even multiculturalists should be happy, since no attempt is made to compare the accomplishments of western and non-western civilizations. Now, however, he lobs the baseball into the hornets' nest. He concludes that dead European white guys have done the best work in the sciences, that Jews are dramatically overrepresented as a percentage of total population, that women have not contributed at the expected rates even after sexist barriers were removed, and that significant contributions in non-western arts have not been made at the same rates as in the west. While Murray's observations on the sciences seem indisputable, his coverage of non-western art is probably the weakest part of the book.

Murray next tries to extract some explanations from the data. His first conclusions are fairly obvious and noncontroversial to anyone with some knowledge of the history of sicence and the arts: war does not disrupt accomplishment, but economic health is required. Next, he points out that models of accomplishment provide behavior reinforcement for aspiring achievers. He also concludes that accomplishment requires freedom of action. Regimes ruled by Saddam Hussein's or Ayatollah Khomeini's are unlikely to produce much in the way of achievement. Further, Confucian duty to family and hierarchy can also stifle creativity.

In the final section of the book, Murray turns back to the nature of accomplishment and the factors that contribute to it, and asks if accomplishment is in decline. Since this is the most interesting part of book, I will not telegraph all of the conclusions in this review. Suffice it to say that his conclusions are anathema to multiculturists and practititioners of literary theory. In sum, this is an excellent, thought-provoking work that will reward any open-minded reader.

This book is much more than cataloguing accomplishments of the arts and sciences and adjudicating their relative greatness. More importantly, this is a book about the meaning and the pursuit of excellence.

Murray has an important message, which crystallizes toward the end of the book. An important part of the human spirit, after the basic needs of survival and procreation are met, is its natural attraction to truth, beauty and good. (This is the best elaboration I have seen of what is meant by the "pursuit of Happiness" in our Declaration of Independence) Given the right cultural climate, the emergence of excellence in the pursuit of truth, beauty and good, will thrive. I do not know if Murray had that message in mind and used the data to support it, or that he analyzed the data to conclude on that message. Either way, the message is powerful.

Murray also made the point the religion (not organized religion, but a mature contemplation of truth, beauty and good) and its contagiousness is what is behind the waves of achievements and discoveries in history, entailing superhuman efforts and sacrifices that produced the greatest art and the articulation of the most insightful truths.

There is in this book a detail list of "inventories" of great and significant figures and an elaboration of how they are selected, with special consideration -- allowing quotas, if you will -- for non-Western achievements. The inventories will undoubtedly generate a lot of debate from the PC crowd. Murray anticipated that and did quite a bit of that debate within the book. If you are a serious reader of the book, you will find that the inventories, despite the amount of space devoted to them, are mere launching pad for the thesis of what is the meaning of excellence.

Like "The Bell Curve", this book is not for everybody. But for those who are drawn to the pursuit and appreciation of greatness and deference to truth, this book resonates powerfully with the mind.

What an excellent book. Charles Murray is a wonderfully clear and gripping writer, regardless of whether he is giving a brief overview of human advancement from 800 B.C. to the modern age or explaining the more tedious aspects of his method for sifting through the histories to find the essential artistic and scientific elite.

While the overwhelming majority of these are men, he takes feminist concerns seriously and goes to great lengths to present both social and biological explanations for the underrepresentation of women. He also discusses the acheivements of other cultures with fair-mindedness, pointing out where, when and in what way other civlizations surpassed our own while unflinchingly exploring the reasons behind the overwhelming dominance of Westerners in the arts and sciences from 1400 on. To accuse him, as some will, of chauvinism and ethnocentricism is grossly unfair, as any open-minded person who reads this book must concede.

Truly, this is an excellent and important work which lives up to its incredible ambition. Buy it now.

This book provides potent ammunition against the central part of the current dogma of multiculturalism, that urges us to accept all cultures as equally praiseworthy. The principle antidote to this pernicious doctrine is to recognize that excellence exists, and to celebrate the undeniable fact of inequality in achievement that have enabled some to enrich us all. While we are perhaps all born equal in some sense, it is really an equality of zeroes; for babies have no political rights--they don't vote or hold office, and their only talent is to find their mother's breast. As individuals grow, the inequalities in them also inexorably grow, and differences become more and more obvious, sometimes even to the professors of sociology, anthropology and education.

Murray's methodology and the data he uses and shows us in all of its glorious detail are refreshingly straightforward to understand, and represents an advance in the application of historiometry that he can be proud of. His finding about the dominance of Western European culture and white males in producing the inventions of the modern world is undeniable. The steam engine, transistor, and the scientific method were not discovered by the Yanomamo, Zulus or Eskimos. Sometimes it is not such a bad thing to state the obvious.

The important endeavor, as Murray emphasizes, is to try to understand the things that make for greatness. What role is played by the accidents of history, the availability of minerals in our territories, the success of our warriors, minorities in our cities, and population genetics? What causes the rise and fall of nations, and what can be done to be sure that our own culture of the West is preserved and protected against the eternal Barbarian at the gate?

This is the first attempt to quantify the accomplishment of individuals and countries worldwide in the fields of arts and sciences by calculating the amount of space allocated to them in reference works. This is quite an achievement, as the writing no doubt requires a lot of reading, analyses, and work.

Although the book is very instructive, I have problems with the methodology used. It is very difficult to compare Shakespeare to another writer like Homer, or Voltaire and Rousseau, as they were from different times and wrote about different topics, some in verses others in prose. It is even more difficult to compare the achievements of Newton to those of Galileo, Faraday, Laplace or Euclid. It would be difficult to make the assertion that Pasteur or Fleming are more or less influential than inventors in other fields.

It is also difficult to compare Chinese achievements to those of the Europeans for two simple reasons: 1) western inventions are well publicized in the English literature while eastern works are rarely translated into English, 2) westerners are more dynamic and outgoing than their Chinese counterparts who in the last two millenia are more interested in moral issues than sciences. It should be noted that for many centuries, the Chinese have made tremendous advances in sciences and arts (gunpowder, ink, wheel, and so on) only to suddenly decide to achieve moral perfection rather than pursuing scientific achievements. The world would have been different had they not changed their minds.

I have learned a lot from the author: his work gives me a visual and global assessment, although somewhat biased, of the achievements of the giants in history. It is also one of the most original and probably controversial books I have ever read. It will certainly cause a lot of ink to flow; therefore, it will have its own place in history.

This was not what I expected. I had anticipated a more leisurely discussion of art history, the story of science, etc on the order of Daniel Boorstin or Fernandez-Armesto. Instead, we're presented with a detailed explanation of the methodology used to determine human achievements and achievers. (The mathematical/statistical discussions should have been placed in an appendix but then they would never have been read.)

Murray maintains that human achievement is based on excellence and that the best measure of achievement is by studying what experts in those fields say. He takes scholarly works and uses statistical analysis based on preponderence of mention to derive a Top XXX List for several categories in the arts and sciences. He offers separate lists for non-Western cultures where we would be comparing apples and oranges (literature, art, philosophy).

Not only does he attempt to identify what human achievement is he is also concerned with answering the why. He spends an inordinate amount of time on the issue of women and minorities. (The vast majority of those listed are European, male and white.) The story of the Ahskenazi Jews and their over-representation vs women and their under representation is a jewel. He even examines documents from works with the stated goal of emphasizing non-Europeans and finds almost exactly the same correlation of "great" events and people.

Especially intriguing were his twelve meta-inventions, tools or observations (artistic realism, polyphony, logic, the scientific method) that changed "everything". There are so many astute observations - artists are expendable and replaceable, scientists are not - the idea of purpose and individuality was a factor - the way individuals saw themselves under Eastern and Western philosophy - the role of war and peace - IQ levels among groups - genetic differences between the sexes - how very limited the area and populations were for achievement.

His thoughts on the sheer, sustained intellectual effort required for achievement should be mandatory reading. People instinctively recognize excellence which explains why "rap", "performance art" and cartoons are not held in the same esteem as a Bach cantata, an Ibsen play or WAR & PEACE. They do not require the skill, study or hours of practice associated with greatness. He ends on a disquieting note with the observation that human achievement is declining. This is a must read for all interested in our species and its possibilities.

Charles Murray is a gutsy social scientist. Back in 1994, he co-wrote the excellent Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) with Richard Herrnstein. The onslaught of controversy from the politically correct faction exhausted Herrnstein (he died not long after the release of the book). But, Murray kept on trucking and a decade later released another politically incorrect outstanding bombshell with this book.

Being aware of the topic's controversial nature, Murray spends nearly as much time explaining his statistical methodology as he does analyzing results. After reading Murray's disclosure, you're overwhelmed by his data gathering effort. And, you are hard pressed to think off how a researcher could have been more objective in this endeavor.

From his extensive data, he develops a ranking of the top 20 contributors in tens of different fields. The usual suspects dominate the podium. In Western literature it is Shakespeare and Goethe. In Western Art, it is Michelangelo. In Physics, it is Newton and Einstein. In Western music it is the usual trio Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach. And so on and so forth.

Murray makes a great effort in capturing non-Western culture by dedicating several inventories/rankings specifically for them, including numerous disciplines for the Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian cultures. His research methodology renders him as well versed in Japanese Art as Arabic Literature. His related analytical commentaries are fascinating and educative.

Murray preempts politically correct concerns by addressing them head on. How about representation of women? As an abstract of his findings, if you are looking for the greatest composers of all time it is just impossible to come up with an alternative to the Mozart-Beethoven-Bach trio. And, the same is true for the other rankings he developed. He mentioned that in his gathered inventory of significant figures 98.5% are male. Speculating that all the well established sources had been heavily biased against women and had missed 50% of such significant figures; that would mean the percentage of male/female significant figures would be 97%/3% instead of 98.5%/1.5%. Murray does not believe the mentioned sources were biased. But, he adds even if they were it would not have made a material difference as stated above. Murray explicitly states men and women are of equal intelligence. It is just that our societies are patriarchal. Access to activities leading to superlative achievements is limited for women. Biologically, women incur the burden of reproduction and child rearing that is a constraint on the maniacal focus needed to become one of the all-time-greats in anything.

How about representation of foreign cultures? As mentioned, Murray already dedicated numerous inventories/rankings to other cultures to give them more than their fair share of representation.

After ranking individuals, Murray goes on to developing chronologies of major events in all the mentioned disciplines. Then, he moves on to analyzing trends in creativity over time and geographical location. You get that just a few places over short period of times generated an inordinate number of luminaries such as Athens during the Greek antiquity and a few Italian cities during the Renaissance.

Murray is intrigued by this phenomenon. In chapters 15 and 16, he analyzes the factors contributing to generating many luminaries at any one time within a specific country. From his multivariate regression models we learn that the major contributing variables to generating such luminaries per country are: 1) # of political and financial centers; 2) # of cities with an elite university; 3) population of the largest city; 4) # of luminaries in the immediate preceding generation (defined as a 20 year span); and 5) GDP per capita. On page 380, he discloses the results of this model. And, it is surprisingly good. Using this model he estimated within + or - 10 the number of luminaries per country from 1400 to 1950. Less than 5% of the defined per country-period have an error greater than + or - 10 in the estimated number of luminaries.

Next, Murray attempts to explain what the model has not. He extensively looks at the role of government with the expected assessment (totalitarian ones are bad as they don't allow individual creativity). He also advances that the reason why Europeans dominate the rankings is because of religious considerations. Confucianism and Buddhism in Asia valued tradition, family, responsibility to community, and detachment from desire and individual aspiration. Murray feels Christianity allowed more room for individual achievements hence related human accomplishments thrived in Europe more than else where. Murray makes a case that Christianity fostered human accomplishments more than our modern secularism. This is because he feels religion gives a greater sense of life purpose than secularism. He extends his theory by explaining why he feels that the rate and quality of innovation in the arts and sciences has declined in the 20th century. Remember, he is not talking just about technology. He is questioning whether our civilization will ever produce music composers of the quality of a Beethoven, or painters comparable to Michelangelo, playwright matching Shakespeare, or even scientists matching Newton or Einstein (ok this last one is just on the cusp belonging in good part to the first half of the 20th century). Even though many would disagree, Murray makes a very interesting point. Do we really have another Michelangelo or Shakespeare to come?

For a much different view of the interaction between science and religion, I also recommend Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and Mike Shermer's Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design.

This work is an effort to survey the whole of human achievement from 800 B.C. to 1950 A.D. In it 4002 outstanding individuals are selected through surveying the encylopedias, biographical dictionaries and other Literature in the respective fields. Murray attempts to compile a collective resume of those chosen of the chosen, who have made lasting and memorable contributions to the sciences and arts. Behind this is the conception that these are the true heroes of Mankind, the single individuals who as Buckminster Fuller used to say, do more significant work for the masses of mankind than they taken together can do for themselves.
This project involved a prodigious amount of research, and is without question a worthwhjle and even noble undertaking. But it despite the disclaimers skewed in its own way, and lacking in the texture and feeling of the very kind of thing it admires most i.e. very great creative work.
Nonetheless it contains a wealth of information, and perhaps more importantly interesting thought about the whole question of cultural and scientific creativity.
The categories of creativity and accomplishment he chooses in themselves leave something to be desired. They are as follows: Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Physics, Mathematics, Medicine, Technology, Combined Sciences, Chinese Philosophy, Indian Philosophy, Western Philosophy, Western Music, Chinese Painting, Japanese Art, Western Art, Arabic Literature, Chinese Literature, Indian Literature, Japanese Literature, Western Literature.
It is quite easy to accept Murray's exclusion of great General and Warriors as principal creators of Mankind, although there certainly is an argument on the other side. But consider what he is left out. He apologizes for leaving out Commerce and Law. But he also leaves out Politics. I think most of us feel that there are a few political leaders, say Lincoln or Pericles or Churchill who deserve to be cited as among those having made major human accomplishments. Consider another omitted category, one most influential to the great mass of mankind, Religion. There are no prophets of Israel on his list, nor is there Jesus or Buddha . There is another kind of fault. With all due respect it does not seem to me that Chinese philosophy should have the same number of distinguished people as Western philosophy, any more than Japanese or Arabic Literature should have the same number of great creators as Western Literature. The truth (ethnocentric , or not) is that Western Literature has many more creators at the highest levels of complexity and beauty than do these other literatures. It is to me extremely odd that Murray has no place on his list for the single religious and literary work that has had greatest influence on Mankind, the Bible.
Murray also deliberately excludes the creative world from which he himself comes, social sciences, and scholarship. In other words it seems to me that Murray would have been fairer had he been a bit more modest, and made it clear that his survey of human accomplishment is confined to certain areas only, and thus partial and limited.
Despite this Murray has done in the areas he has studied a very credible job. He shows how in almost every area of creation there are two or three figures who stand far above the rest in the opinion of Mankind. In Western music it is Mozart and Beethoven with Bach close beside. In Western Art history Michelangelo looms above all but with Picasso , Raphael beside . Behind them are Leonardo and Titian. In Western Literature it is Shakespeare who Murray taking a page perhaps out of Harold Bloom , sees as the outstanding creator in all categories. Shakespeare in Literature is followed by Goethe and Dante. And here I would say even this small sampling shows that a problem Murray tries very hard to deal with, a problem of taking `quantity'( of references and mentions)for ` quality' is not easily soluble. My own taste tells me that Tolstoy leaves in sheer creative power and complexity Goethe far behind, and that Picasso has no place being in the same list with Michelangelo and Leonardo. Yet I agree with Murray's major point that in the great majority of cases there is a clear human consensus . If Einstein and Newton stand on the top of the Physics list towering above all others this certainly makes sense to us. So too I suppose do Darwin and Aristotle at the top of the Biology list.
Murray takes a yeoman- like job in compiling the lists of great and outstanding creators and analyzing those lists. The book has a tremendous richness in this. It talks about questions such as why there are women are so underrepresented on the lists, why dead white males so overrepresented, why Europeans are too so overrepresented, why Ashkenasi Jews are at a time so over- represented. It talks about the acceleration in creative accomplishment especially in scientific areas as we approach the present. And in his introduction Murray explains why he has stopped at 1950, this partly because it takes time to weed those who will stay out, and partly because of his doubts about the value of the artistic and literary contributions of the latter part of the twentieth century.
But I think that Murray's major point and the heart of his contribution is in again reaffirming the idea that there are great individuals, that they do create in miraculous and what may seem to us, unbelievable ways and that all of us should be in their debt.
In illustrating this point so well, Murray suggests that the human enterprise has a dimension of heroism in creative work that should give us all consolation, inspiration and hope.
I have touched upon only a few of the themes that Murray considers in this tremendously interesting and thought- provoking work.
All concerned with the human creative enterprise should have this volume in their library.

I am biased to believe a good analysis, and this is one of the best ever published. The author takes great care to ensure that his data and methods are clearly laid out. He critiques his own findings, and points out weak points in the argument with the same vigour as when expounding his conclusions. In short, he adheres to the principles of good science and objectivity.

The text and observations are rich and dense, with no fluff or emotive arguments. The shear scale of his analysis and sources are impressive. Even when exploring hypothetical causes of his findings (which is opinion, not science) he draws on many respected authors and credited sources.

This is one of the most significant studies and books I have ever read.