Different World

This comparison between the accomplishments of Muslims versus the accomplishments of Jews, as measured by Nobel prizes awarded, took me quite by surprise. The basic data is verified by Wikipedia here and here. Take a gander:

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000, or 20% of the world population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:

1988 - Najib Mahfooz

Peace:

1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat

1994 - Yaser Arafat

Physics:

1990 - Elias James Corey

1999 - Ahmed Zewail

Medicine:

1960 - Peter Brian Medawar

1998 - Ferid Mourad

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000, or about 0.02% of the world population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:

1910 - Paul Heyse

1927 - Henri Bergson

1958 - Boris Pasternak

1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon

1966 - Nelly Sachs

1976 - Saul Bellow

1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer

1981 - Elias Canetti

1987 - Joseph Brodsky

1991 - Nadine Gordimer World

Peace:

1911 - Alfred Fried

1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser

1968 - Rene Cassin

1973 - Henry Kissinger

1978 - Menachem Begin

1986 - Elie Wiesel

1994 - Shimon Peres

1994 - Yitzhak Rabin

Physics:

1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer

1906 - Henri Moissan

1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson

1908 - Gabriel Lippmann

1910 - Otto Wallach

1915 - Richard Willstaetter

1918 - Fritz Haber

1921 - Albert Einstein

1922 - Niels Bohr

1925 - James Franck

1925 - Gustav Hertz

1943 - Gustav Stern

1943 - George Charles de Hevesy

1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi

1952 - Felix Bloch

1954 - Max Born

1958 - Igor Tamm

1959 - Emilio Segre

1960 - Donald A. Glaser

1961 - Robert Hofstadter

1961 - Melvin Calvin

1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau

1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz

1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman

1965 - Julian Schwinger

1969 - Murray Gell-Mann

1971 - Dennis Gabor

1972 - William Howard Stein

1973 - Brian David Josephson

1975 - Benjamin Mottleson

1976 - Burton Richter

1977 - Ilya Prigogine

1978 - Arno Allan Penzias

1978 - Peter L Kapitza

1979 - Stephen Weinberg

1979 - Sheldon Glashow

1979 - Herbert Charles Brown

1980 - Paul Berg

1980 - Walter Gilbert

1981 - Roald Hoffmann

1982 - Aaron Klug

1985 - Albert A. Hauptman

1985 - Jerome Karle

1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach

1988 - Robert Huber

1988 - Leon Lederman

1988 - Melvin Schwartz

1988 - Jack Steinberger

1989 - Sidney Altman

1990 - Jerome Friedman

1992 - Rudolph Marcus

1995 - Martin Perl

2000 - Alan J. Heeger

Economics:

1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson

1971 - Simon Kuznets

1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow

1975 - Leonid Kantorovich

1976 - Milton Friedman

1978 - Herbert A. Simon

1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein

1985 - Franco Modigliani

1987 - Robert M. Solow

1990 - Harry Markowitz

1990 - Merton Miller

1992 - Gary Becker

1993 - Robert Fogel

Medicine:

1908 - Elie Metchnikoff

1908 - Paul Erlich

1914 - Robert Barany

1922 - Otto Meyerhof

1930 - Karl Landsteiner

1931 - Otto Warburg

1936 - Otto Loewi

1944 - Joseph Erlanger

1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser

1945 - Ernst Boris Chain

1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller

1950 - Tadeus Reichstein

1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman

1953 - Hans Krebs

1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann

1958 - Joshua Lederberg

1959 - Arthur Kornberg

1964 - Konrad Bloch

1965 - Francois Jacob

1965 - Andre Lwoff

1967 - George Wald

1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg

1969 - Salvador Luria

1970 - Julius Axelrod

1970 - Sir Bernard Katz

1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman

1975 - Howard Martin Temin

1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg

1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow

1978 - Daniel Nathans

1980 - Baruj Benacerraf

1984 - Cesar Milstein

1985 - Michael Stuart Brown

1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein

1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]

1988 - Gertrude Elion

1989 - Harold Varmus

1991 - Erwin Neher

1991 - Bert Sakmann

1993 - Richard J. Roberts

1993 - Phillip Sharp

1994 - Alfred Gilman

1995 - Edward B. Lewis

The Jews are not demonstrating with their dead on the streets, yelling and chanting and asking for revenge; the Jews are not promoting brain washing the children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non-Muslims.

The Jews don’t hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics; the Jews don’t traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.

The Jews don’t have the economic strength of petroleum, nor the possibilities to force the world’s media to see “their side” of the question.

Perhaps the world’s Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems…

It doesn’t surprise me that Jews, with their culture that glorifies intellectual accomplishment, would be over-represented in the Nobel prizes. Nor does it surprise me that Muslims are under-represented — in modern times, at least, it appears that Muslim culture has drifted very far toward mysticism irrationality. But the degree of the difference I was shocked by.

I see this as very worrisome evidence about how different modern Muslim society is from modern Western society. It tells me that a significant fraction of the human population — 1.2 billion people — is stuck in some kind of primitive intellectual wasteland that has kept them from participating in the extraordinary accomplishments of (the rest of) mankind over the past century. And this makes me worried about whether we’ll ever succeed in integrating modern Muslim society with the rest of the world — the beliefs and intellectual contexts of the two groups may just be too far separated to be integratable.

That’s my depressing ponder for the day…

Tip o’the hat to frequent contributor JimM…