<p>The Best and Brightest Charles Murray tries to quantify "Human Achievement."</p>
<p>BY GARY ROSEN Thursday, October 23, 2003 12:01 a.m.</p>
<p>In our age of overused superlatives, none stands in greater need of rehabilitation than "genius," a title that Leonardo now shares with such eminences as Warren Buffett and Eminem. Charles Murray's rough-and-ready test is whether an individual's work makes us ask, in wonder, "How can a human being have done that?" But he doesn't stop there. Incorrigible social scientist that he is, Mr. Murray wants to prove that supreme excellence actually exists in the arts and sciences. The result is "Human Accomplishment," a systematic effort to rate and rank the likes of Aristotle, Mozart and Einstein and to describe the conditions that have allowed them to flourish. Much of this brick of a book is devoted to explaining, in tiresome detail, just how Mr. Murray goes about quantifying the seemingly unquantifiable. His trick is to consult the experts--or, rather, to distill usable numbers from their encyclopedias, anthologies, general histories and biographical dictionaries. An individual making an appearance in at least 50% of the selected sources for a given field wins the label "significant figure." By Mr. Murray's reckoning, there have been 4,002 such "people who matter" in the period 800 B.C. to 1950. Each member of this Pantheon gets an "index score" on a 100-point scale, based on how much attention--pages, column inches, etc.--he receives in the specialist literature.</p>
