Patience and the Pecking Order

In Does Ancient DNA Track Human Progress, or Just Time?, I asked whether genetic scores associated with human capital track the development of complex societies after chronology is taken into account. This follow-up shifts the emphasis towards a different trait: patience.

A farmer has to wait for a harvest. Someone building an institution has to think beyond the next meal. That makes delayed gratification a plausible contributor to social complexity. Here I examine hierarchy, one aspect of that broader concept. The first results suggest a positive association between a genetic score oriented towards patience and both administrative and settlement hierarchy. The evidence is preliminary, and its strength varies across models.

The link could be direct, if patience helps people sustain specialised institutional roles whose rewards arrive later. It could also be indirect: greater delayed gratification might support investment and specialisation, producing more complex societies that develop additional layers of administration and settlement. These are possible mechanisms to investigate. The present associations do not tell us which pathway operates, whether either is causal, or whether other historical processes account for the pattern.

The crucial test is whether patience contributes anything beyond intelligence and education. I put all three scores into the same models, then checked which results survive stricter genetic-quality filters and the removal of whole regions. Below I show the full comparison, the regional stress tests and what happens when I ask the scores to predict history.