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Comment by mikorym | Hacker News Reader

I think that modern religions and the way they learn to part with certain medieval ways is critical.

The Jewish religion has been arguably successful with this, producing exceedingly prestigious scientists and mathematicians.

The risk is always the "fundamental" factions.

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Interesting because in a way the Islamic faith has been dealing with the opposite problem.

During the Medieval era a lot of the most prominent scientific discoveries in Europe were done by Muslim scholars in a wide variety of fields.

However the modern radical approach to the religion has definitely resulted in many scientists having to abandon their countries and faith due to a variety of reasons.

The medieval Arab world was the inheritor of a Greco-roman culture that they initially ruled with a light hand as a aristocratic minority. As the Arab and eventually Turkish culture asserted itself and turned inward those remnant disappear. By the time modern fanaticism rose, that brief flourishing had been gone for at least 500 years.

I know this is true at least from a mathematical point of view. The common knowledge case is the conic sections that were discovered during this time. But like the library of Alexandria, our historical knowledge has the infortunate property of being limited by extant texts.

I wouldn't credit the religion ( fundamental or not ). After all, much of modern science was created by "fundamental" priests, clerics, adherents, etc ( from copernicus to newton to mendel ).

Rather, the jewish scientists benefited from living in wealthy colonial europe which provided opportunities ( though there were anti-semitic roadblocks as well ) for research.

There is a reason why most of the prominent jewish scientists are from germany, britain and US. You need wealth, infrastructure and research instutions.

Jews in the middle east, china, africa, etc haven't as much due to instability, lack of wealth, infrastructure, etc.

The same goes for chinese scientists. The US has produced a couple of chinese noble prize winners ( in sciences ). China has produced none since they were going through colonization and the unstable post-colonialism periods. Now that they are getting wealthier, developing infrastructure, etc, I'm going to guess that in the next couple of decades, china will produce a few noble prize winners.

Science, like art, is a "liberal" pursuit which stems from ancient greece where the wealthy "liberals" had time to think because they were free ( liberal ) from work because their slaves did most of the work. In modern times, excess wealth is a prerequisite for most research. When you or society is desperately trying to survive and feed its people, nobody has the free time for "liberal" pursuits.

I don't know about the others, but Kopernik was hardly a "fundamental" priest. He organized the defense of Prussian towns who sided with Poland against a Teutonic Knights army who had the permission of the pope to "baptize" these "pagan" lands.

Polish/Prussian side (which Kopernik supported, even including participation in the defence of the besieged city) argued that pagans had the right to live and defend their land, and that faith alone is not a sufficient justification to conquer foreign countries.

And it's not even sure if Kopernik was a priest at all. He was a canon at Frombork Cathedral, but at the time you didn't have to be a full-blown priest, he could have just been a deacon or even a subdeacon (and that's the currently favoured theory).

> There is a reason why most of the prominent jewish scientists are from germany, britain and US. You need wealth, infrastructure and research instutions. Jews in the middle east, china, africa, etc haven't as much due to instability, lack of wealth, infrastructure, etc.

Thanks for mentioning not all Jews are European. Most Jews in Israel, for example, are not European. Nearly the entire ancient communities of Iraqi, Yemeni and Persian Jews are almost in Israel. If not for modes of dress (and even then), the casual foreign observer would often not easily tell apart Jew from Arab in Israel. At least, I often cannot.

They are higher risk, but sometimes come with great rewards too. I'd say Martin Luther King was pretty fundamental, as was Gandhi and a bunch of other people I have to credit with doing a lot of good.

Fundamentalism is not a appropriate term for the sort of leadership that King and Ghandi gave. Fundamentalism has come to mean a preoccupation with obeisance to formal rules, taken literally.

I disagree that their religion produced them.

Their genetics and their environment did, to varying degrees, but religion is only one small aspect of the latter.

What's your basis to assert that it is the most important factor?

I'm not sure if genetics play as great a role as culture. IMO there is enough genetic variation in all cultures to produce Einsteins, but some cultures are able to cultivate that potential better than others.

You can't separate culture from religion, but culture is distinct from religion.

I'm actually really mad at Jordan Peterson for answering the Jewish Question and giving it a platform. I assume that's where you got your opinion from, but if you didn't, many will agree with you because of JBP.

It's almost certainly genetics. Ashkenazi Jewish people have been a persecuted subculture for centuries, long before the Holocaust. There are a remarkable number of genetic disorders that are extremely common among Ashkenazi Jews that are extremely rare in everyone else. This points to very strong genetic similarity. Scott Alexander [1] has a lot more on this topic.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...

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