The overall poor English skill of Chinese people probably has a fundamental impact. Even educated Chinese are often disconnected with the outside world, leading to a cultural isolation, so that there is virtually no groundbreaking theories in humanities and arts, as well as in science, came out of China during the last century. The Soviet education system had been targeted as the scapegoat of underachievement in China sine Xinhai Revolution. However, USSR/Russia produced many Nobel Prize winners, Fields Prize winners, and many World Chess champions. While all Nobel Prize winners are certainly very clever, we also admit that some of them were the lucky ones, being at the right time at the right place [(3), p.149] . In areas which demands high level abstract thinking while does not require sophisticated instruments and team collaboration such as mathematics and chess (as measured by Fields Award, Turing Award and Chess championship), in last century China mainland’s performance also paled (13-15). While our neighbor to the west India in her native land produced Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman [1888-1970] with Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930, Amartya Kumar Sen [1933-] with Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998, and Viswanathan Anand [1969-] with World Chess championship in year 2007-2013.
Though I knew Switzerland has good reputation of doing high quality of science and documents published by Swiss scientists tend to rank the top on citation per article (6-8), Switzerland is also the home for pharmaceutical giants like Novartis and Hoffmann-La Roche, it still caught me by surprise with I generated this graph. I congratulate Swiss scientists that they apparently did an excellent job. We also need to take notice that there will likely be a ‘lagging effect’; with the investment associated the performance of Chinese medical scientists will further improve in the future. On the other hand, these data do agree with the common notion that a nation’s scientific performance is not necessarily related to its general population size, such as Miller (9): “good science can only be done by a small minority of each country’s population”; Kanazawa (7): “Science is…inherently elitist”; Murray [(3), p.310]: “Great human accomplishment has not come about just because the world accumulated enough people”.
博主回复(2016-8-17 17:03)：Even educated Chinese are often disconnected with the outside world, leading to a cultural isolation, so that there is virtually no groundbreaking theories in humanities and arts, as well as in science, came out of China during the last century.
博主回复(2016-8-17 17:03)：法国人想法语走遍天下，德国人想德语走遍天下 - they gave up already. 现在英语事实上已经走遍天下
博主回复(2016-8-14 18:21)：Wáng YX. Why China is currently underperforming in medical innovation and what China can do about it?—Part III: social psychology and evolutionary psychology perspectives. Quant Imaging Med Surg 2015;5(4):494-502. doi: 10.3978/j.issn.2223-4292.2015.05.01
博主回复(2016-8-14 18:20)：After left Africa, our ancestors did not have prepared solutions in the form of evolved psychological mechanisms for novel, non-recurrent problems. Novel, non-recurrent problems require thinking and reasoning in order to solve them. Solutions to novel, non-recurrent problems require improvisational intelligence, the ability to reason deductively or inductively, think abstractly, use analogies, synthesize information, and apply it to new domains. As a result, many of our potential ancestors undoubtedly died because they could not solve these novel problems. Kanazawa (62) argues that general intelligence (g) evolved as a domain-specific adaptation against the background of the originally limited sphere of evolutionary novelty in the ancestral environment in Africa. Intelligent individuals are better able to solve problems than less intelligent individuals, only if the problems are evolutionarily novel. It has become universally important because we now live in an evolutionarily novel world. If novel, non-recurrent problems happened frequently enough in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, then any genetic mutation that equips its carrier to think and reason would be selected for and could evolve as an adaptation in order to solve novel, non-recurrent problems.
博主回复(2016-8-14 18:19)：Cognitive demands placed by the need to survive harsh winters in cold climate select for higher intelligence, and thus general intelligence is expected to evolve and become higher in colder climates. A climate that is too cold to grow crops for part of the year demands foresight and self-control skills, which then serve as resources for other development. When migration to frontiers or rugged lands of cold winter and sparse population; settlement in the frontier encourages independent mentality and individualistic social institutions (66). Templer and Arikawa’s analysis showed that (67), across 129 nations, winter temperature is negatively correlated with average intelligence (r=−0.76, P<0.01, with winter high temperature, and r=−0.66, P<0.01, with winter low temperature)
博主回复(2016-8-14 18:18)：The relative lower achievement of American students in primary and secondary schooling, as compared to some East Asian students, may reflect more distant forces due to cultural traditions that emphasize individual learning and social learning differently. However, Euro-American countries remain the world leader in scientific, technological, and business innovations. The evolutionary psychology may partially explain why it is difficult for recent China to produce polymaths such as Mikhail Lomonosov, Leonhard Euler, Henri Poincaré, Andrey Kolmogorov, John von Neumann, or Leonid Kantorovich.
博主回复(2016-8-14 18:17)：Historical and contemporary evidence showed that indicates smaller extents of environmental variability in China than in Europe, favoring social learning in the East and individual learning in Europe (50). Corresponding to these different adaptive strategies, East-West differences stem from learning styles that differ between copying and rote memorization, on the one hand, and critical thinking and innovative problem solving, on the other hand. Eastern cultures also encourage conformity and compliance and social hierarchy all of which facilitate social learning and Western cultures encourage independence, self-assertion, and personal pursuit of interest which enable individual learning or innovation.
博主回复(2016-8-14 18:16)：A similar phenomenon can be found in India. The Parsi is an endogamous group with high levels of economic achievement, a history of long-distance trading, business and management. They descend from a group of Zoroastrians from Great Persia who migrated to India during the 8th or 10th century to avoid persecution by Muslim invaders. The Parsis have made considerable contributions to the history and development of India, all the more remarkable considering their small numbers (constituting only 0.006% of the total population of India). India’s ruling Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, which has dominated the Congress Party since independence was created when Feroze Gandhi (a Parsi with ancestral roots in Bharuch) married the then Indira Nehru. Ratan Tata, India’s most successful industrialist and owner of Jaguar Land Rover and Corus Steel, the late Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, India’s most celebrated soldier, and the acclaimed novelist Rohinton Mistry are all Parsis (38-40).
博主回复(2016-8-14 18:15)：One typical case of strong and recent natural selection is the unique demography and sociology of Ashkenazi Jews in medieval Europe selected for high intelligence (33). Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average intelligence quotient (IQ) of any ethnic group. They are overrepresented in fields with the high cognitive demands. During the 20th century, they made up about 3% of the US population but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes and 25% of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions (33). Another intriguing aspect is the story in Russia during 1870-1950. Russia drove out a large portion of its Jewish population, and persecuted the ones who remained. And despite all that, Jews are over-represented among Russian significant figures in sciences and humanity by a ratio of 4:1 during this period [(9), page 281].
