Think of all the most innovative cultures. What do they all have in common? Cold seasons.
You cannot afford to be lazy in a cold, seasonal climate:
- You can’t live impulsively. If you don’t stock food or plan winter shelter, you’re dead
- You must cooperate, or you’re dead
- You must delay gratification, or you’re dead
- You must create tools, preserve food and build storage systems, or you’re dead
Lazy, shortsighted behavior is punishable by death. Cognitive load increases and forward thinking becomes a selective breeding trait.
The closer to the equator you are, the less change there is. Resource abundance and constant climate mean no pressure to innovate, no long-term planning requirements. Warmth means comfort and comfort means complacency (biologically speaking).
Seasonal cognition is what led to the invention of calendars, agriculture and scheduling. The environmental force that paved the way for:
- Industrial revolutions
- Scientific method
- Modern infrastructure
Innovation thrives where the future is uncertain and immediate gratification is punished. Future orientation is an environmental phenomenon.
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What this effectively does is create a culture that rewards:
- Innovation
- Trustworthiness
- Forward thinking
- Delayed gratification & impulse control
- Cognitive selection
These preferences get imposed on the gene pool as one big selection filter.
Must have worked backwards until 2000 years ago when northern europe had nothing and all the civilizations were in the south
it's true that cold climates select for intelligence but almost nobody knows that cold climates are also responsible for more connected brains during development.
the selection argument is obvious
if you live at the equator with year-round food availability, shortsighted behavior has low costs.
eat what you find, repeat tomorrow
but seasonal climates punish impulsivity with death. can't store food? you die
can't cooperate through winter? you die
can' t plan six months ahead? you die
the cognitive demands compound: tool creation, food preservation, shelter construction, resource allocation across time. lazy and shortsighted becomes a death sentence (that's why today's comfort allows for lazy to survive). natural selection filtered for planning, cooperation, and delayed gratification and over thousands of generations, this adds up
but there's a second biological mechanism
a 2021 study in Cell Reports (Kiral et al.) found that developmental temperature directly affects neural wiring
flies raised at 18°C developed 26% more synaptic connections than those raised at 25°C
same genome and everything but different temperatures led to different architectures.
slower development gives neurons more time to extend branches and form synaptic connections.
faster development at higher temperatures means less time for connectivity to branch out
the flies raised in cold had both more synapses and more diverse synaptic partnerships.
connections that didn't form at all at 25°C appeared reliably at 18°C. the neural network was literally more complex.
also adult behavior was adapted to developmental temperature. flies performed optimally at the temperature they developed in which means that the brain wired itself for its expected environment
so cold climates work through two channels:
- selection pressure over generations (genes for planning and cooperation survive)
- developmental plasticity within a single lifetime (cold builds more elaborate neural networks)
culture downstream of psychology downstream of biology downstream of environment (duh)
the GDP correlation with latitude isn't random, and the mechanism isnt mysterious once you trace it to the substrate.
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