Have you seen this one? U 1125 at Krogsta.

My home town! :)

But it is at least striking and indisputable that it is precisely in Western Europe where we think mostly of the church and its influence that modern science emerged and so vigorously developed. Correlation is not causation but the counterfactual, that the church inhibited it would be hard to show.

The “church” considered broadly as an institution has existed for a long time and in many places and it is hard to draw completely comprehensive conclusions. Byzantium for example isn’t normally associated with significant scientific advances (but see people like Philoponus who influenced Galileo).

Of course the scientific revolution made immense advances. But these advances were in many cases built on or at least partly anticipated by earlier work. The idea of dividing human history into watertight “periods” such as the dark ages or scientific revolution has long been abandoned by historians.

In many cases it was the church structures themselves that enabled technological advance. One example is the development of blast furnaces and metallurgy by the Cistercians (see eg

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laskill ) and arguably it was the Reformation that put a stop to such inventiveness.

The height of the power of the medieval papacy was between say 1100-1300 peaking with Innocent III at 1198-1216. But that corresponds to the “high Middle Ages” which saw great advances in all sorts of ways in Western Europe including in science and technology.

When do you think that period was?

Last time I visited you had to get the key from a shop down the road is that still true??

With the wonderful Purbeck effigy of Lawrence of Arabia!

Main findings: clades very imbalanced; large clades likely to have emerged at time of high tempo and then slowed; expected amount of molecular change on each branch equal (so no molecular clock in this model) and large diverse clades expected to be accompanied by small, conservative “living fossils”

Wildflowers

That’s what I always thought until I moved to Sweden where they fly around my summer house!