HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025955 It could also be that they have an additional set of learning directives in place that adapts them better to a more hunting/running style of life, whereas the Europeans had to adapt for identifying long-term seasonal patterns, delayed gratification for agriculture etc. and CONCEPTS could be layer to layer communicaiton. . are gender differences also a matter of time , and structure of interactions. . I suspect gender differences are mostly motivational, i.e. we have a reward system for all the different social and cognitive needs, which makes us receive different kinds of pleasure and pain, thereby pay attention and learn. You cannot learn what does not attract your attention. Women tend to find abstract systems, conflicts and mechanisms intrinsically boring. Most women in computer science do not write programs because they enjoy solving puzzles, but because they want to help people, get approval etc. There are almost no women in math, because it does not help people or yield social attention. Men tend to find elaborate social relations boring. If there is no pleasure in observing and empathizing with people, one will not have good social cognition. IQ is not the only meaningful difference. Chinese pay an inordinate amount of attention to authority. I suspect historically., the authorities tended to kill them a lot if they did not. Jews tend be intellectually independent and anti-authoritarian, which might make them creative and inventive in ways that are hard to find in Asia. At the moment, I think speed/quality of brain development plus motivational system are the key to understanding both mind and individual differences. Important part of human language might be the result in a motivational need to discover/invent grammatical structure, which as a side effect makes us interested in music. It would mean that Chomsky's life long hypothesis, that people have a special circuit for grammatical language, is wrong. They might