The Cheese and the Worms was lovely. It also dissuades you of any notion of the idyllic past, the sheer weight and organization of the totalitarian church was impressive.
This is a very utilitarian view of learning. Mass education isn't meant just to teach you marketable skills, it's quite explicitly designed to create a shared understanding of the world, a nation. Plus in "medieval" times people also went to church a lot where someone lectured you from a book, with similar goals in mind.
Yes it is: "Group selection, which was once widely rejected as a significant evolutionary force, is now accepted by all who seriously study the subject." (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3110649/)
It's very likely that aging is driven by some kind of scheduled gene program. It makes perfect sense to phase out individuals from a group-level selection point of view.
That's a lot of words, including a sentence that in which the author almost compares himself with Galileo. The proof is in the pudding no? What did you predict with it?