From the Social Selection of Leaders to Evolutionary Advantage Leadership models, cognitive development, meritocracy, and institutional adaptability

This article develops an evolutionary-institutional model in which a society's long-term competitiveness is determined not so much by its current stock of technologies as by its capacity to continuously generate new knowledge, technologies, and leadership strategies. Central to this model is the social selection of leaders: a collective, largely implicit image of the legitimate leader shapes who a society admits to status, resources, and decision-making power. The proposed model links this mechanism to meritocracy, social mobility, cultural evolution, and the capacity of institutions for self-renewal (Nosalsky, 2026a; Nosalsky, 2026d; Nosalsky, 2026e). A second level of the model concerns the formation of human cognitive potential. Neurodevelopment is sensitive to environment, and early adversity and chronic stress can alter the developmental trajectories of brain networks and processes associated with myelination (Teicher et al., 2003; McLaughlin, Weissman and Bitrán, 2019). However, the article does not make the unwarranted leap from this fact to the claim that meritocracy directly "produces intelligent scientists." Instead, it proposes a testable hypothesis: a social environment that reduces chronic stress and supports freedom of thought, education, academic autonomy, and open social mobility may increase the likelihood that existing human cognitive potential is fully realized. A third level concerns the creative process itself. In a separate work, the author proposes an evolutionary architecture for artificial creative cognition, in which variability, autonomous processes, internal state, controlled forgetting, and the selection of search strategies together form a mechanism for generating new hypotheses (Nosalsky, 2026c). In this article, that construct is used as a conceptual analogy and a source of hypotheses, not as evidence that the human brain operates identically to the proposed artificial architecture. The central conclusion is that institutional reform can be understood as a way of creating an environment in which human creativity, scientific inquiry, and positive social selection mutually reinforce one another. This potentially creates a long-term technological advantage that does not depend on possession of any single technology: a competitor may copy a result, but it is far harder to copy the institutional capacity to keep producing the next one. AI Usage Statement: Artificial intelligence tools (OpenAI ChatGPT-5.6 Luna, Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5) were used in the preparation of this manuscript. The AI assisted the authors in structuring the text, refining the literature presentation, and improving the linguistic quality based on the original research ideas, concepts, and methodology developed entirely by the human authors. The final text was thoroughly reviewed, verified, and approved by the authors, who take full responsibility for the integrity and accuracy of the content.