The final and great remaining question

From Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. A very intriguing and rigorous discussion of what constitutes accomplishment, how do we measure it, and how do we explain it.

For West and non-West alike, there remains the final and great remaining question: Why do streams of accomplishment begin and end? So far, the variable we have examined that has the most explanatory power is the number of significant figures in the preceding generation. The relationship is important in itself. It bears directly on the question that puzzled Velleius from his vantage point two thousand years ago, that Alfred Kroeber tried to attack with the limited tools available to him the 1930s, and that Dean Simonton subsequently answered for both Western civilizations and for China. The processes that lead to human accomplishment in the arts and sciences are self-reinforcing, involving the emulation of models and the availability of a growing creative edifice that the new generation can build upon.

But valuable as it is, this finding does not tell us what generates a major stream of accomplishments in the first place. We face a more pedestrian version of the problem that faces cosmologists trying to understand the history of the universe. They know a great deal about what happened nanseconds after the Big Bang began. They just don't know how it got started. The variables in the last two chapters tell us much about the dynamics governing streams of accomplishmment once they are underway. They don't tell us what ignites the blaze or why it dies out.