Standardized diversity
A recent article in Science 1 celebrates human diversity across countries and cultures. It also showcases the need to understand deeply held and sacred beliefs to avoid misunderstanding behavioral differences. This makes sense. However, one could also think about diversity as a noise that is not fundamental to the human psyche. Modern humans arrived 30,000 years ago with clean and simple objective functions – maximization of food, shelter and reproduction, not significantly different from most other animals. That was a very short time ago in the scheme of evolution and the basic architecture of humans had very little time to change. Although the large brains sported by humans allow them to create complex behavior patterns that mask the basic objective function that drives them, it does not mean that humans have fundamentally changed. It is just the opposite – they are remarkably the same.
Diversity, thus, has to be put in the context. The observable diversity across the 7 billion human samples across the planet is skin deep. From a hardware perspective, the human genome is remarkably non-diverse, thanks to a bottleneck humans had to endure early on, that restricted homo-sapien population to a few thousands. They ballooned from a singular origin and a very small base. Most of the hardware diversity seen today by humans – color of the skin, hair and eyes - takes so little a change in the genome, it is virtually undetectable to science. It should be noted that a large percentage of the world's GDP is wasted today on "protecting," and "nourishing" differences that are not detectable under a microscope.
On the software side, the diversity question is more complex. For example, languages currently show significant diversity from a linguistics perspective – but they all serve a singular purpose. Clothing and food show differences, but these are cosmetic. Religions and ceremonies show such small differences, it is amazing that people see them as different. Finally, belief systems, that most argue are different are based on common templates that are familiar to everybody. Humans are sophisticated animals clinging to the same ideas, that drive Carbon based life – from the mighty bacteria to the lowly worm.
There is little diversity among humans today – they are fundamentally driven by the same needs and they generally act the same way given the same initial conditions.
1. Explaining Human Behavioral Diversity, Ara Norenzayan
