Humans have been so successful because we've started evolving "memetically", which is a process where cultural memes affect brain evolution, and brain evolution affects cultural memes. African languages do not have a future tense, meaning they did not evolve in an environment where future thinking was required for survival. This means their brains would not be optimized for such thoughts, and is one of the reasons they have poor impulse control. Go watch interrogation videos of Africans and you'll see the same pattern; the cop will ask why they did some heinous act, and they will invariably respond the same way: "I wasn't thinking".
First time I've seen someone else mention this here!! It's actually fascinating stuff. The way we think has a lot of rootstock in our language and how we communicate. That and the fact they never evolved to store food over winter and you get a people who can go pick dinner off a tree, with no concept of what tomorrows dinner looks like.
Genetics.
Humans have been so successful because we've started evolving "memetically", which is a process where cultural memes affect brain evolution, and brain evolution affects cultural memes. African languages do not have a future tense, meaning they did not evolve in an environment where future thinking was required for survival. This means their brains would not be optimized for such thoughts, and is one of the reasons they have poor impulse control. Go watch interrogation videos of Africans and you'll see the same pattern; the cop will ask why they did some heinous act, and they will invariably respond the same way: "I wasn't thinking".
First time I've seen someone else mention this here!! It's actually fascinating stuff. The way we think has a lot of rootstock in our language and how we communicate. That and the fact they never evolved to store food over winter and you get a people who can go pick dinner off a tree, with no concept of what tomorrows dinner looks like.