Babies who are born in winter and spring are perhaps carried by mothers who eat more and are less active towards the end of their pregnancies, perhaps allowing for more brain growth by the babies.

We would do well to see if there are any correlations here before proclaiming that it was microbes wot did it.

Let me assure folks that I'm primarily interested in getting out the data; I won't hold strongly to my pet interpretation if it's off the mark.

But re: mothers getting more rest & better nutrition, recall the historical trends -- per capita rate of genius-level accomplishment declined shortly after the Renaissance, acclerated downward after 1800, and remains low in the 20th C. If the seasonality effect were due to better rest and nutrition cultivating the potential specified by genes, then surely there should've been an increasing rate of genius accomplishment during recent history, given 1) the Flynn Effect, 2) maternity leave, and 3) increasingly better sanitary conditions. But paradoxically, these improvements accompanied a decline in the rate of genius-level accomplishment.

It could be just randomness with such a small sample size at the top levels. If the much more numerous lower deciles don't show it, that seems to me to be evidence against it.

could it be that the microbes are disrupting developmental pathways causing them to go off course; ie creating more randomness and a greater standard deviation? If that's the case then there should be a greater proportional of criminalls and other low IQ markers for those months as well... might be a lead worth investigating.

Yes, I'll go with Richard Sharp. A child born in winter/spring was conceived in spring/summer.

It's either maternal nutrition or something like vitamin D from sunlight affecting the early embryo. Sunlight is at it's peak at the summer solstice just between spring and summer.

We might need to advise mothers to add vitamin D to their folate if they are planning to conceive.

Sorry Richard, that's Sharpe with an "e".

I may have missed it through hasty reading, but where is the data on the proportion of *all* children born in the Winter-Spring half of the year?

...for example, see the data and discussion in Wrigley and Schofield's 'Population History of England', pages 288-90. In pre-industrial England births were disproportionately concentrated in the months December to April. This may be a common pattern.

TC: it's not a random sample -- this is the entire population of revolutionary geniuses, as there are no others in the top five deciles in Murray's survey. That is, if you did the survey 100 times, these figures wouldn't change. In Music, Bizet would not end up on top and Mozart below the 6th decile, for example. A score of 86 might change to 82 or something, but that's why I used rougher measures like deciles. For comparison, is it merely a random accident that all the people are male? I.e., if you did the survey again, would the male to female ratio change to 50-50? Murray's book is very accessible & explains the historiometric methodology.

Dan: Again, any account must fit w/ the historical trends. If greater nutrition & vitamin D during conception are the reason for the jump to genius, why has there been a decline in the rate of genius accomplishment when 1) IQ has been going up (Flynn Effect), 2) sanitary conditions are better for mothers, 3) nutrition is superior to before, and 4) recently mothers have had maternity leave so they don't waste calories toiling, etc.?

I think the nutrition part has to do w/ the avg person's IQ gain from being WS (as mentioned in the McGrath et al study I linked to). But as for the genius' seasonality, remember, we're not talking about a few IQ points -- it's the difference b/w Bizet and Mozart or Beethoven. Peano vs Gauss.

DavidB -- Good point. I did mention that I assume that P(WS) = 0.5. Admittedly, a more senstitive measure would've been to find the P(WS) for all the time-places that produced these people. That still doesn't explain the subtlties, though -- why the most abstract fields are more WS than the least, why the giants are more WS while the bottom 5 deciles rarely show a consistent pattern, etc.

Agnostic,
There been some recent studies that have suggested that modern populations are vitamin D deficient. They have been recommending supplementation to increase modern D levels. D may also influence some factor that increases variance in IQ or it may itself vary so much between individuals that it increases variance.

Agnostic: I didn't mean to dismiss the theory, which is very interesting. On looking at the Wrigley and Schofield data, the seasonal variation of birth rates is not large enough to explain the disproportionate numbers of 'geniuses' born in the Winter-Spring period. Also, one would have to take account of infant mortality rates, which I guess would be higher in winter and tend to offset a surplus of winter births.

Interesting link.

Who said the rate of geniuses is decreasing, and what exactly defines a genius? In what world is Plato a genius of greater magnitude than any other? Have you read Plato, he makes lots of bad arguments with poor logic. Clearly he was smart and extremely influential, but you don't know where all his ideas came from or how smart he was. I would hardly call him a supergenius of the highest order.

Euler is a bigger genius than Gauss? Maybe by the pure volume of math papers published, but Gauss was almost without a doubt "smarter" than Euler. How can bacteria affect historical circumstance?

If this is coming from Murray's book, isn't genius something that has to do with your influence and historical impact? If so, then that is not a measure of genius. That's a measure of luck.

If you are attempting to say that the number of geniuses per-capita is decreasing, wouldn't that be a little silly considering that it was easier to be influential a long time ago, a lot easier than it is now?

Agnostic,

Good luck convincing most of the readers here of the difference between genius and IQ.

There is a lot of anectdotal evidence that polio survivors are driven overacheivers.

Hmmm, I know of two polio survivors. One is my uncle, the other is a chinese guy who is a doctor. Neither seem to be overachievers. The chinese guy has a brother who is a lawyer, a sister who is a doctor and another brother who is a deadbeat, but he is no overachiever.

Anecdotes do not make good evidence.

I agree with Hyperbole. The drastic rise in accomplishment of the average person may provide an illusory impression of a declining rate of genius-level accomplishment. From the Agricultural Revolution until the beginning of the 20th century, the great majority of people even in developed countries were chronically malnourished. Even in 1800's England, most children had Vitamin D deficiency and a substantial number of those had overt symptoms like rickets. In modern studies where multivitamins are given to inner-city children, one of which my wife worked on, children who experience an IQ benefit from the vitamins typically experience it on the order of 10-15 IQ points, a full standard deviation.

All of which leads us to consider the actual accomplishments of these historical "geniuses." On the side of art, today's filmmakers and video game designers regularly produce works of awe-inspiring originality and skill, creating de novo worlds and races of beings, without limiting themselves to angels and classic mythology. On the side of science, there is no denying that discoveries in Newton's day were simply easier to make, when someone studying physics could have learned everything there was to know about that field in at most one or two years. The discoveries that were then made, like splitting and reconstituting light with two glass prisms, pale in comparison to the everyday feats of imagination of today's computer programmers.

Every culture respects its own historical "great men," but it's important that we judge their accomplishments on a modern scale. There is a good reason why a graph of technological achievement in modern times shows a geometric increase: in Newton's day there were dozens of good scientists, but today we have millions.

Hyperbole & Gathercole: Read Human Accomplishment and McNeil's Plagues and Peoples.

Dan: the rat study examined how lack of V-D affected the newborn's brain -- they deprived some but not others. So, the scenario is V-D deprivation leading to larger brain, larger lateral ventricles, etc., not the mother making more V-D during pregnancy. If lack of V-D accounts for seasonality of genius births, does it fit the historical trend? Did V-D deprivation increase up to & after the Renaissance, but then decrease (i.e., babies get more V-D) during 19th & 20th C? I don't know, but the Little Ice Age did occur from roughly just pre-Renaissance to mid-19th C. We'd need to look at better records to find out, though.

I don't want to downplay the role of vitamins: they're more biologically grounded than "parental pressure." But they're not alive and thus don't evolve, limiting the range of powers they have in affecting human behavior. By contrast, microbes are alive, are actively doing things moment to moment, and evolve quickly, allowing them to effect changes both subtle and gross in the human brain in either positive or negative ways. They're an especially good place to look when someone looks like they're from outer space, like Newton or Mozart.

Case in point: schizophrenia, which was the motivation behind the rat study you linked to. They're investigating V-D deprivation as a cause of schizophrenia (the enlarged lateral ventricles of schizophrenics are also so in V-D deprived rats). It clearly can't be sufficient for schizophrenia, so the argument is then that it only triggers the disease in genetically susceptible individuals -- but at a prevalence of b/w 0.5% and 1%, it's way too common to reflect genetic susceptibilities. They would've been selected out long ago. The cause must be infection, though V-D deprivation may exacerbate it.

As a rule of thumb, when some researcher (who usually hasn't studied evo bio) mentions (lack of) V-D w.r.t. individual differences, it's a code for WS seasonality, and in the big scheme of things, that by default implies infection, unless it's clear (lack of) V-D is the causative agent as in rickets. It's not that vitamins aren't critical, it's just that compared to the world of microbes, they're wimpy as causal factors.

Agnostic,
I only read the abstract.

I remembered the two stories from news items I'd read over the more-or-less recent past.

I'm sure you'll sort it all out.

You really seem set on your theory.

it's a code for WS seasonality, and in the big scheme of things, that by default implies infection, unless it's clear (lack of) V-D is the causative agent as in rickets.

So we should use the infection theory as a default, even though a host of other variables also vary by season? I don't think this is reasonable.
You haven't shown any evidence *other* than the WS genius counts for infection increasing IQ (and there are other explanations for the WS data, as noted). To my mind, the claim that an infection can lead to an increase in mental powers is an extraordinary one. There are many microorganisms that do lead a symbiotic existence with their hosts, but in general we would expect to see a beneficial organism become widespread fairly quickly.

You are quick to dismiss the idea of vitamin D in part because being born in winter would of course not result in a lot of vitamin D production in the newborn. However, equally plausible would be that vitamin D production at some other point in development would be a critical factor (e.g. prenatally or else at 3-6 months of age). Since we have both the well-known correlation between birthweight and IQ *and* evidence that first-trimester exposure to increased sunshine increases infant birthweight (

meh, cut off trying to insert link.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.c...ETRY=1& SRETRY=0 for abstract of paper showing increased birthweight for mothers exposed to increased sunlight in first trimester.

To address another objection: the effects of nutrition are probably fairly small on average, but the question is whether a model that applies that small bonus across the entire bell curve is accurate. We already know that a small advantage will result in ever-increasing overrepresentation at the right side of the tail, but only if our simple statistical model is accurate.

Finally, genius seems rare enough that we may all be right. Maybe you need vitamin D and other prenatal nutrition and an infection early in life combined with three other things we haven't thought of to produce someone like Gauss...

I guess I have the same comment several others do about the distribution of revolutionary geniuses historically--there's some large part of this that just comes of being in the right place at the right time. You can see this in information theory, where a whole bunch of the real pioneers have died in the last few years. Someone like Shannon was absolutely a genius, but he could have been just as smart, working in some other area, and been an important contributor to physics or evolutionary biology or statistics or whatever, but not someone who will (IMO) appear in the 2100 edition of Murray's book. The combination of the right set of problems, new technology that made those problems interesting and tractable, and the right person came along, and we got the birth of information theory. Look at all the pioneers of modern cryptography, who are mostly about the same age. You can be Gauss reborn into a new body in 2006, and you just aren't going to invent public key cryptography, information theory, etc.

There's still great stuff to do, and scope for genius. But I suspect it's a lot harder to do something now that puts you in competition with Newton or Darwin than it was for them.

Self-nitpick: The pioneers of modern cryptography are mostly about the same age as one another, but not as the information theory guys, who were much earlier.

Bbartlog: other things vary by season, but the most powerful is other living, evolving things. Remember what we're trying to account for: Mozart and Gauss. If you observed a population of Mozarts, you'd by default assume natural selection rather than drift was at work. On an individual level the powerful cause is genes, yours or those of microbes. Vitamins don't have as much potential as germs to affect human behavior, so I don't surely discount them, but I don't bet on them either.

Re: why these germs aren't more widespread: we're assuming superhuman genius will get you tons of girls to make babies w/, but we don't know that. I listed the number of kids each of the 14 WS giants had: mean = 4.2, median = 3. Granted this is collapsed across time-places, and we'd have to look to see, e.g., in Italy in 1600 whether Galileo's output of 3 kids was above or below mean and by how much.

But it doesn't sound like the Ashkenazi story where they had huge families -- my guess it that IQ-fitness is an inverted-U: gains up to 120s or 130s as w/ Ashkenazi professionals result in bigger families in pre-industrial eras, while superhuman genius is likely at or slightly below-avg due to a wider gulf b/w the genius guy (always) and the wife, geniuses having Herculean work ethic, being possessed by their work, and again, appearing to be from another planet. On this view, superhuman genius would be a mild fitness cost -- the proverbial "mad genius."

Albatross: Murray also argues all the early geniuses picked the low-lying fruit, and the 20th C geniuses thus don't have much to prove themselves w/. I generally sympathize, but before the Renaissance someone could've easily said that the Greeks figured out all the important easy stuff, leaving us w/ only the hard details. Before 20th C, someone could've said Newton et al figured out all the important easy physics, leaving us to fill in details.

And the real place to look is the arts -- there, there's no low-lying inevitable discovery. Beethoven's symphonies would not have been composed by someone or other; he wasn't just in the right place at the right time. I look at music most b/c it's the most abstract art. Murray's argument is that the culture grew less supportive of artistic genius around the Enlightenment / French Rev, after which people saw less and less purpose to life, thus not feeling compelled to utilize their genius toward their higher "vocation."

Somehow, I don't buy it, again just a subjective take on it. But if there were another small handful of Mozarts, Beethovens, and Wagners out there, I can't imagine them doing anything other than dreaming up the next big idea in music and working tirelessly to get the material out there, whether they believe in a "vocation" or not. Same for visual art: most of the recent crap art isn't due to sub-optimal use of genius brains, it's that they're not geniuses to begin w/. Of course they'll create crap!

Crap, I know I'm commenting too much, but I forgot another quibble w/ vitamins. (Honestly, I appreciate criticism and am not defensive. :) ) The reason is that vitamins, hormones in utero, etc. fall under the shared environment in Behavior Genetics, which doesn't seem to greatly affect how individuals w/in a given population turn out w.r.t intelligence & personality. In roughly equal proportions, the causes are additive genetic effects and unique environment. Genius germs would go under the latter, which makes the theory dovetail better w/ findings in Behavior Genetics. I wrote about this in parts III and IV over at my other blog.

Someone may already have made this point, but in pre-industrial times the quantity and quality of nutrition generally would vary with the seasons. Not just vitamins but basic proteins, carbohydrates and fats. It is therefore possible that the quantity/quality of nutrition at some crucial point in the development of the fetus (especially the brain) might also vary with the seasons.

Just a few questions about this: is there any eveidence at all for "resident bacteria" in the brain? I am sure more than a few have been thrown into the waring over the years.

2. I suppose Murray's book is fun and all, but can we really take this sort of data collection as truly measuring "genius?" After all, think about all the (probably variant) contingencies that lie between the appearance of genius and Mr. Murray counting an appearance of that genius's name. 1) The genius would have to live long enough to do something worthy of notice; 2) That thing would have to get noticed, in spite of, say, the perosn in question being, say, a Polish serf; 3) This person would have ot be oriented toward creating an impression among his or her peers; 4) his or her peers would have to find this person's genius worth extensive written discussion; 5) the media in which that discussion took place would have to survive long enough in order to get collected in a place where Murray will later find it; 6) The genius would have to be of a sort that pleased later collators; the genius in question's actual work would have to survive that long as well, because w e are reluctant to call someone a genius if we haven't directly experienced their work; 7) because we are a modern, literate, culture, and the accomplishments of past geniuses are largely known, we have to take into account the fact that the field on which genius may play may be getting smaller and the opportunity to display genius diminishing; 8) we also have to take into account the degree to which "genius christening" is a force unto iteself, and that MANY geniuses are known and talked about primarily as exemplary geniuses, not because the folks who cite them actually think the "genius work" is really all that; etc. etc. etc.

When all these contingencies are accounted for, what's left?

OPK

One interesting point made in the _Bell Curve_ is that the US (and presumably most other advanced industrial economies) does a very good job of getting the people with a lot of potential into college. This would make you expect *more* genius now than in earlier times.

I recall reading something years ago about correlation of season of birth to whether you'd be a scientist. It was in _Psychology Today_ about 20 years ago, but other than that, I can't give a reference.

Might this be an effect of SAD on parents or children at some critical time in their development? (Time to look for twin studies where the twins end up at very different latitudes!) Or an effect of whether the kid gets to go outside or is stuck inside during some span of months during some critical developmental point?

Since film is an art form mostly confined to the 20th century, it would be interesting to look at the greatest directors or the greatest screenwriters and check when they were born.

Here are some directors (all dates are from imdb.com):
Kubrick 26 July 1928
Scorsese 17 November 1942
Hitchcock 13 August 1899
Carl Dreyer 3 February 1889
Spielberg 18 December 1946
PT Anderson 26 June 1970
Jean Renoir 15 September 1894
David Lynch 20 January 1946
Steven Soderbergh 14 January 1963
Francis Ford Coppola 7 April 1939
Joel 29 November 1954 and Ethan Coen 21 September 1957
Terrence Malick 30 November 1943
Errol Morris 5 February 1948
Victor Fleming 23 February 1889
Walt Disney 5 December 1901
Hayao Miyazaki 5 January 1941
Ang Lee 23 October 1954
Akira KurosaWA 23 March 1910
Wes Anderson 1 May 1969
Orson Welles 6 May 1915
Michael Mann 5 February 1943
Godard 3 December 1930
Truffaut 6 February 1932
Tarantino 27 March 1963
Werner Herzog 5 September 1942
Frank Capra 18 May 1897

Some of these, like Wes Anderson and PT Anderson, the jury is still out on imo because their body of work is not large enough yet. I couldn't find a date for Wong Kar Wai.

There does seem to be a clustering toward winter but there are incredible exceptions like Welles, Hitchcock and Kubrick. It doesn't look too good for you if you're born in the summer. Either it won't happen or you'll be one of the greatest filmmakers ever, no in between. I wonder what would happen if you researched the birth dates of almost all directors to see if there's a bias away from summer though. Are more crappy directors born in summer? Of course, Ed Wood was born in October (10 October 1924). hehe What directors am I missing? I feel like I'm missing a lot of Golden Age directors.

I can't believe I forgot these two:

John Ford: 1 February 1894
Sergio Leone: 3 January 1929

who says that musical genius has declined? I am pretty sure that musical creativity has reached a historical high in this day and age.

Jazz,Blues,Rock,Metal,Prog Rock,Punk,Electronic,New Wave...

RAP!

Electronic/Techno, Hardcore...


Seriously, I think the treatment of classical music is the greatest instance of cultural ignorance in this discussion. If you want to be scientific about things, then you can't just go "classical music is the pinnacle of music".

What have been the cultural effect of the beatles, the doors, etc?

I think the musical mastery of the band Radiohead is comparable to any classical composer. I think the musical complexity of Dream Theater songs surpasses most classical music.

Come on...

Oran: microbes that affect the brain -- Part I and Part III.

Lindenen: We'd need to rank-order those people in order to better tell how seasonality affects excellence, but here's the number crunch of the unordered list: Sum = 2/28, Fall = 7/28, Win = 13/28, Spr = 6/28. So SF = 9/28, WS = 19/28; WS to SF = 2.1 to 1.

Oran, Hyperbole, et al: The point was not to debate the meaning of "genius" -- I defined it strictly as a shorthand for "someone showing up in the top 5 deciles of Murray's lists." The lists don't capture every genius in the broader sense, but the unknowns are tied to the knowns -- for every known Mozart, there are X unknown Mozarts. So, this doesn't affect the rate of increase or decrease. There will always be people in the top 5 deciles since they're relative, but that's why I say genius-level accomplishment -- something on the level of Mozart or Gauss.

Re: the Doors, New Wave -- dude, we're talking genius-level excellence, not what you find most agreeable to your personal tastes. I know more and listen to more of those types of music than I do classical, but I also recognize that the former don't require the same level of intelligence & creativity to compose. For one thing, the harmonies are baby-simple. Try composing a fugue to rival Bach's sometime -- not easy. Throat-singing is the mirror-image: complex harmonies but simple melodies. The giants & geniuses of classical music devised insanely complex melodies and harmonies for multiple instruments in their head, often churning out works daily. Putting subject tastes aside, New Wavers don't come close.

Hyperbole: remember we're talking about the rate of genius-level accomplishment, or their proportion of the general population, not absolute numbers. Since the population of the West exploded over the last 200 years, there should be even more Beethovens and Gausses if the rate were equal or increasing. Quite the opposite is true.

I know there are brain diseases, but most of the ones I know about are serious bad news. The analogy that you make at the start (with resident bacteria in the gut) makes me wonder whether there really is anything like that in the brain. A fair number of viruses can go into long-term and relatively benign remission, I suppose. That might be one possibility for something similar to gut flora in the brain.

On the genius question: I think the assumption that I would want to question is that the ratio of recognized Mozarts to overloioked Mozarts remains relatively constant. I suspect that ratio probably fluctuates quite a bit over time and across cultures.

OPK

On hyperbole's point about music:

I can see both sides of this. The question I'd put to you is: Is the point of music for it to be complex? Does the most intelligent or most ingenius musician necessarily make the most complex music?

I'd say not. I think complexity may be a poor measure of musical accomplishment. So you've listed the complex geniuses. Who are the geniuses who employ relatively simple means?

agnostic:

I'm going to have to go point by point and it's going to be a little long...

You argue that your theory is supported by the supposed fact that the rate of geniuses as defined by Murray, has decreased substantially. This is supposed to correlate with the general decrease in bacterial infection-rates experienced by people. Thus your theory is consistent. This is highly counterintuitive as avg IQ has been INCREASING, while infections usually make babies DUMBER etc.

I think you are wrong when it comes to rates of genius and your source is flawed. This is why:

Genius as you define it depends on historical circumstance, whereas bacteria can only affect a person's physical brain, right? Yet your method of identifying geniuses is consulting a book written by an old pompous man who is obsessed with western decline. In that book, a genius is determined by how influential a person has been.

It follows almost necessarily that people earlier in history will have more of a chance to be influential. It takes 4 years of undergrad to reach the pinnacle of mathematics as it stood at the end of the 19th century. It takes highschool to learn it up to the beginning of the 18th century. It takes 9th grade to learn it up to the beginning of the 16th century to the time of the greeks.

It takes 4 years of grad school to be able to meaningfully contribute to mathematics.

How can you compare mathematicians today to those of the past based on your rubric and then use that to claim that there are fewer geniuses now than before? The complexity, depth, and abstraction in mathematics has increased so much that any comparison along those lines is absurd.

Now, you try and evade this criticism by turning to music which you claim is completely free from this effect. BUT, music is a subjective thing, and this is causing issues. More and more diverse forms of music have been invented in the past 100 years than the previous 500 or 1000 probably.

You defend the exclusive focus on classical music because it's somehow "harder" and requires more "intelligence". Besides disagreeing completely (how many prog-rock kids are there at berklee school of music? ALOT) I will point out that this was precisely my argument for dismissing people who were not unusually intelligent but whose impact happened to be deep because of timing.

Either way...

The popularity and importance of classical music has waned. I would guess that very few of the most musicically talented individuals in modern times become classical composers. It's a dead artform.

Bands like Radiohead and Dream Theater and many others come from musically sophisticated backgrounds including prestigious music schools and CLASSICAL backgrounds.

"The giants & geniuses of classical music devised insanely complex melodies and harmonies for multiple instruments in their head, often churning out works daily. Putting subject tastes aside, New Wavers don't come close."

But wait, what about jazz musicians, rap freestyles, math rock... you're simply wrong here. Jazz musicians often demonstrate amazing abilities, and musican skill. They improvise on the spot, etc. Come on. Jazz gets pretty crazy. Rappers write songs as they sing them when they freestyle. When done well, even making clever puns and maintaining clear meaning, carrying a theme, all while rhyming and keeping a rhythm. Math-rock bands like Meshuggah maintain complex polyrhythms and use weird time signatures that are very difficult to play.

You are limiting your data in a way that supports your pet theory by necessity. That's not very objective.

As far as music goes, I think you are wrong, and you are definitely wrong when it comes to historical trends in other fields.

I believe that the per capita rate of genius has INCREASED, and you can clearly see it by looking around. I would contend that almost every single fields medal winner ever, is on the level of any of the 8 decile or higher mathematicians. I would contend that Richard Feynmann, Murray Gellman, Stephen Hawking, Paul Dirac, heisenberg, bohr, etc are all up there, and it is a known fact that chess players are getting better and better, younger and younger.

So, I think your theory has a hole in it, since genius has not changed. And you cannot fall back on the "influence" definition of genius, because that clearly is dependent on time period. All you have is a statistical anomaly (maybe, if birthrates by season in those time periods weren't as skewed as we think) that has a dozen or so possible explanations, one of which is really cool and counterintuitive, but which is contradicted by evidence from the 20th century.


Finally, I have wasted far too much time already, but parts of the world still experience much in the way of child mortality and infection. Why aren't those places churning out geniuses? It would only make sense.

On the contrary, most geniuses seem to be popping up in college towns where college professors are having children with other professors, or at random from here or there.

Oran: most brain infections likely screw it up rather than help, but then so do most gut infections. Still allows mutualism. But I'm doubtful that Michelangelo-level genius is really the brain "functioning better" -- we only care about how well brain function generates babies or helps raise nieces / nephews. Looking at how many kids the giants had, it's not clear that their superhuman genius got them tons more babies than expectation. Again, "mad genius" vs "bright professional."

The rates of known to unknown could fluctuate, but the point was that over time, it's easier to become known if you've got the gift, so the only scenario that would contradict the decline in the rate would be if there were increasingly more unknowns per known -- despite currently much greater ease of being discovered, mentored, and given a job doing math or composing.

Hyperbole: our intuition is rarely useful in complex matters. And from a biological point of view, our intuition should not ask "how likely is it that infection made a person smarter" but rather "how likely is it that it increased their reproductive fitness?" Again, superhuman genius doesn't appear to get you tons of babies. We have to step out of "cultural mode" where Newton & Beethoven are deities and into "biological mode" where they're freaks and genetic dead-ends.

It may seem strange if IQ has been going up, but not necessarily -- mean IQ may be going up slightly while variance may be decreasing quickly. Infection is a likely cause of folks w/ freakishly low IQ, but then it could be so as well for high IQ. Less infections means the tail-ends shrink and the curve bunches more around the mean which meagerly increases.

Another thing: we're only talking up to 1950 w/ any certainty. Also, I'll put it plainly: unlike Murray, you don't have any hard data or quantitative analyses on recent geniuses and their proportion of the population (the rate). The reason is simple: it's too early to tell who will be the next Mozart -- some currently influential people may drop out as future critics more soberly evaluate their oeuvre, while others may make the encyclopedias from out of the blue (posthumous recognition of excellence).

Moreover, everyone everywhere is biased to exaggerate the importance of the recent past ("epochcentrism"), so we really will have to wait 200 years to see how many people still think Radiohead are geniuses -- we don't know cuz we're biased by their recent influence. How many Nobel Lit winners will folks still read 700 years from now, as we still read Boccaccio?

Re: music forms. Not a single example you named has complex harmonies. That doesn't make Jazz unlistenable; it just means Bach had to be more intelligent & creative to do both complex melodies (as w/ Jazz) and harmonies. Harmony is like a de facto test of digit span on an IQ test -- how many complex thoughts can you juggle w/o dropping any? Beethoven did this while deaf.

As for decline in rate, again, I didn't propose that infection was the sole cause -- only someone who didn't read my post would think that. I explicitly said I didn't discount Murray's views -- he agrees w/ you that scientific genius is harder to see now since all the low-lying fruit's been picked. I agree but somewhat disagree -- statistics and genetics were invented recently, so I'm healthily skeptical about the low-lying fruit account.

You disagree the rate of the arts is in decline -- not really debatable up to 1950 (read Human Accomplishment), and only anecdotal after 1950 (and also biased by epochcentrism).

Why few third world geniuses? Again, read my post: I said the infection is necessary, not sufficient; another obvious necessary condition is high IQ due to additive genetic effects. And mean IQ ain't too high in s-S Africa, for example. More, genius germs don't a priori have to inhabit every corner of the globe, just as malaria is confined in space.

So what I presented is not a statistical anomaly -- if anything, WS kids are less than 50% since more will die due to infection, extreme weather, sparse food, etc. Seasonality does not have "a dozen or so" explanations, and even among the existing ones, one can discriminate which are more powerful and thus capable of producing what to us looks like a space alien. I welcome the vitamin D input, but I personally don't think it's as powerful as germs.

20th C data cannot possibly contradict either my or Murray's account, as you have no data sets, and as you're biased by epochcentrism.

What's your standard for "hard data?" If it's incomplete, skewed, or non-applicable, I'd say it wasn't very "hard." I'd say it's "shaky" at best, and that interpretations that rely on such data are "highly dubious."

Just because Murray has some data doesn't mean we've know anything applicable to the questions you are trying to answer here. Murray has counted some stuff and compiled tables, what remains to be determined is what has he counted?

Lastly on the hypothesized change over time in genius rate (it should go up): I think, as both hyberbole and I have written, I think there are good reasons to expect genius as Murray measures it to go down as science advances, not up.

Out of curiosity, couldn't the rate of geniuses have gone down because more people are involved in cultural matters?

i.e. if you have ten Newtons, they can only get a tenth as much attention each.

I've never seen this addressed in discussions of Murray's book...

Hyperbole said:
"I think the musical mastery of the band Radiohead is comparable to any classical composer."

I've liked what I've heard of Radiohead, and it is a lot more harmonically complex than the average non-classical music. But they are nowhere near as complex as the higher level classical composers like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, or Brahms.

Oran said:
"So you've listed the complex geniuses. Who are the geniuses who employ relatively simple means?"

Mozart. A lot of his work is very simple. Some Bach, Haydn, and Handel (though I don't know where Haydn and Handel rank).

agnostic said:
"Re: music forms. Not a single example you named has complex harmonies. That doesn't make Jazz unlistenable;"

Correct.

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