(Incidentally, I don't know why you sometimes drop back to failing to capitalize but it makes what you write much harder to read.)

I don't know either. I have noticed that I will often stop using capitals in parentheses, even if they contain multiple sentences or words that are supposed to be capitalized like "I". (you can see in the first parenthetical, and this one, missing capitalization, even though that first parenthetical in my previous comment is in a section of text where, otherwise, i was capitalizing.) I don't really care. I can capitalize when I want to impress people. Here I do not wish to impress. I want to filter people. If they can't look past some capitalization -- if they are shallow -- then let them dislike me and we'll go our separate ways quickly. You can, btw, looking through my history see that I've asked people tangential questions sometimes which might be taken as rude or aggressive. It's again for filtering purposes. I don't regard offending a portion of the people here as a bad thing, but a good thing. Then when a few people like me better and keep talking with me, my tone changes somewhat, and I'll write stuff like this which is more open, cooperative and non-confrontational. Then one thing that will happen is other people, who I didn't write this for, will jump in and find it arrogant, condescending, and so on. But I think you (JoshuaZ) might appreciate these remarks. No guarantees, but worth a try.

For example, if one doesn't good nutrition then people won't be as smart and so won't innovate. Similarly, if one doesn't have free time people won't innovate.

Where does free time come from? Where does better nutrition come from? Ideas.

Here's an example from BoI: llamas. South America had llamas. Why didn't they spread? Why didn't they get sold to distant towns, and bred to have more, and used to save tons of labor and create more free time? It's not for lack of suitable animals that people were doing more hand labor in some places than others. It's for lack of ideas.

Some technologies and cultural norms also reinforce innovation. For example, having a written language allows a much larger body of ideas, and having market economies gives market incentives to coming up with new technologies.

Yes, that's just my point. Things like written languages, technological ideas, and pro-progress cultural norms aren't natural resources provided by Nature. They are ideas people have. And they make all the difference.