Cognitive Genes and East Asian Specificity: From EDAR to the Evolutionary Legacy of Working Memory

East Asian genomes are enriched for several adaptive variants forming a “Winter-Summer Bipolar Adaptation Module”. The EDAR V370A variant reaches frequencies of 90–95% in East Asia (vs. 10–15% in Europe, 0–5% in Africa), driven by positive selection around 30–35 thousand years ago. Its pleiotropic effects include a 15–20% increase in sweat gland density, altered hair morphology, and higher frequencies of shovel-shaped incisors. Recent studies reveal that the EDAR signaling pathway extends beyond ectodermal appendages to participate in neurodevelopment, potentially influencing cranial morphology and brain volume. Neanderthal-derived cognitive genes—NRG1, CADPS2, CNTNAP2—exhibit systematic enrichment in East Asia, with frequencies of 25–35% compared to 10–15% in Europe and near-zero in sub-Saharan African populations for Neanderthal-derived haplotypes, reflecting prolonged introgression and selection histories in the East Asian tempering zone. Cross-cultural cognitive neuroscience demonstrates that East Asian populations show stronger activation in conflict monitoring (Stroop task) and prospective memory tasks, with effect sizes (Cohen's d) ranging from 0.3 to 0.6. These differences cannot be fully explained by culture and education, which account for approximately 50% of the variance, suggesting a partial contribution from gene–culture coevolution. This paper proposes the “Cognitive Phenotype Residue Hypothesis”: population-level advantages in executive function are residual phenotypes from long-term environmental filtering during the Last Glacial Maximum and subsequent glacial cycles. We explicitly declare that these differences are probabilistic, of medium effect size, and that culture remains the primary explanatory variable—this hypothesis is in no way a variant of racial science.