Ancient literacy and contemporary high achievement

From Who's who in science by Steve Sailer. Fascinating. The post is about the research of Nathaniel Weyl on surnames.

The echoes of history are often lost in noisy tumult but the echoes remain.

Of course, Weyl's choice of surnames to focus upon could bias the national indices to some extent. One of Weyl's most amazing findings is that people with old English clerical names (Clark, Clarke, and Palmer) that indicate their direct male line ancestors were literate around the time surnames were adopted (about 1300) are 50% more likely to show up on lists of high achievement than people with other English names.