Red Queen

Did you ever stumble across something and find it both nothing like what you were looking for and yet very interesting?
Look up 'Red Queen' in Wikipedia. I was trying to find it if it was another name for Mary, Queen of Scotts. Instead, I find an article discussing the theory of the evolutionary arms race and the advantages of sexual reproduction over asexual reproduction. This is about a month after reading an article on the fact that some scientists have created technologies that essentially allow a woman to reproduce asexually (why, and who's willing to fund stuff like this?). Plus I wonder if this is the principle upon which the game Spore is designed, where your competitors develop specializations to compete with your own specializations.
As a race, it strikes me that humans have specialized via different cultures that emphasize affinity towards a given skill. As a stereotype, Russians are very good at math and chess and other logics. Indians are very good at programming, and the Japanese at precision, repeatability and quality. Where does that place Americans? Are we good 'out of the box' thinkers? If so, and if that theory applies to this situation, does that preclude other nations from developing blue sky thinking qualities because they evolve to compete by specializing in something else?

I posed these questions to a couple of friends with whom I feel I can ask these things. They came back with:

Isn't the stereotype (real or not) cultural-based also? How much affect on the development of those specialties did the local resources have?

To which I replied:

A question for a question: How many of these stereotypes developed post world war 2, when the cultures began to shift with respect to the global nation? No longer was there the desire to conquer, but to distinguish. I would suggest that pressures of the outside world shaped perceptions of that culture as much as, if not more than, local resources.

The topic is on going.