Flowers are pretty, because that is what bees like. They are not just billboards advertising “nectar here for making honey” Creatures fully optimized for evolution still have plenty of time for beauty and joy. It is the maladapted that are sad, and perish.

It honestly does not take much intelligence to do better than evolution in a well defined problem situation. Evolution rules because it has been at it for so long.

In such discussions at less wrong , the general idea is that if evolution is allowed to just continue on its own without transhumanist intervention, then eventually the future will be bereft of everything we consider valuable. It will literally be all breeding all the time and nothing else. I tend to agree with that thought.

Roger Bacon was put in solitary on bread and water.

Nor is Galileo a myth. He was given a tour of the instruments of torture and forced to recant that the earth moves, under threat of torture.

Of course the fact that they survived this, and their fame was not extinguished, makes Christianity way better than all the alternatives.

In Islam, the equivalent of Tycho was beheaded, his observatory destroyed, and all his records destroyed.

The Chinese equivalents were entirely erased.

Under progressivism, their equivalents merely lose their jobs, and excluded from polite society, which progressivism plausibly claims is an improvement on the Christian record, and it would be an improvement if progressives were not so passionate and thorough about eliminating all dissent everywhere. Christianity was, though sporadically harsher, not nearly as passionate and thorough.

He was one of Grosseteste’s students. Grosseteste was probably one of the first English scholars with access to surviving Greek texts.

That is to say, around the time that Roger Bacon proposed the conquest of nature: Proposed science and the scientific method giving rise to technology, the application of technology making businessmen rich, businessmen funding technology, and, in the process, funding science and the scientific method.

That seems to me the glaringly obvious explanation, Bacon’s explanation. Nothing to do with the black death.

Capitalism, science, and the scientific method. It is obvious.

Of course today we have state science. The scientific method was ditched in favor of peer review in the 1940s, and for capitalism, increasingly we have crony capitalism.

>>And what happened at the end of the Second Bronze Age that led to an age of Darkness?
The white tribes of Asia where pushed back into Europe by proto mongols and proto Chinese causing the largest barbarian invasion in history.