Diversity is in the news again, thanks to Biden announcing that he will appoint a Black woman to the US Supreme Court. Conservatives are already lining up to denounce the idea, even before they know who in particular will be nominated.

Various boards of various companies and societies are uniformly on board with the “diversity” idea but it’s hard to say if this kind of diversity will have any effect. Diversity of appearance is consistent with uniformity of views.

Nevertheless diversity in practice is vital to the operation of society. Almost everything humans achieve requires various kinds of diversity.

A diversity of dangers

Recently the coronavirus (COVID) has given us an object lesson in diversity. It’s been successful because, on the one hand, it reproduces almost uniformly by the gazillions. But not 100% uniformly. There’s a small amount of diversity in its reproduction, so not all viruses are identical. This has given rise to the variants, omicron being the latest

The Corona virus is not alone in this diversity. No living species reproduces with 100% uniformity, otherwise (as we’ll see) they wouldn’t last for long.

Humans are no exception. Everybody is a little bit different in almost every aspect – height, weight, build, body chemistry, hormone levels, and so on. The result is that some of us are vulnerable to particular bugs, and some of us are resistant. So no one bug will wipe us all out.

It’s possible that omicron fizzles out after a few weeks because it has infected not everyone, but almost everyone in the fraction of the population vulnerable to it.

A diversity of ailments

One striking phenomenon is the variety of ailments that we humans suffer. Heart disease, diabetes, anemia, osteoporosis, stroke, emphysema, … I could fill the whole post with a list.

Of course most of these ailments have identifiable causes. Diabetes is obviously connected to an over-sugared junk-food diet. But not everyone who eats sugary junk food gets diabetes.

The vast diversity of ailments probably reflects the vast diversity in the human body. And variations that make us resistant to one ailment may make us vulnerable to others (sorry, a lot of speculation here). If so there’s no use fiddling with genes to produce diabetes-resistance individuals, we need to reform our diet so that people won’t want (or be forced) to eat sugary junk food.

Many faces

Enough with sickness. One of the most delightful ways in which humans are diverse is in appearance. Men and women, of course, but tall, short, heavy, skinny, clumsy, graceful, and so on. And above all, we all have individual faces. Among all the hundreds of people you know, are there any two with identical faces? I’m sure not. There may be two that look alike (especially if they’re related) but none you can’t tell apart with a glance.

This is not an accident. In any group of people there will be a variety of abilities and personalities and as a result a variety of roles they play and relationships they have with you and each other. The group could not function if no one could tell who’s who. Ahh, this is Chris, who’e good at fixing things, and this is Pat, who’s strong and who likes Erin, who’s good at settling arguments (note the role of names).

I believe humans have evolved to have, and recognize, diverse faces to make this possible. As evidence I sight the disorder prosopagnosia (face-blindness). People with face-blindness cannot recognize faces even if they’re looking straight at them. They have to rely on rules, like dark rimmed glasses+mustache means Jim.

Apparently face blindness is the result of disfunctioning in a special part of the brain devoted to … recognizing faces. People with this disorder (fortunately rare) lead a difficult life. I knew someone with it and when I met them I always introduced myself – “Bill Wadge here” – even if they were looking at me straight in the eyes.

Many voices

Fortunately there are other ways in which humans vary. Voices – everyone has a distinct voice. Voices are almost as useful as faces for distinguishing individuals. I don’t believe this is an accident, though as far as I know there is no ‘voice deafness’ disorder.

This accounts for a striking fact, that (professional) singers all sound different. Nobody confuses Neil Young with Bruce Springsteen, or Beyonce with Madonna. Even when they are performing the same song together, like Ringo and (Sir) Paul McCartney there’s no mistaking them. Lesser performers may consciously imitate more popular ones but never 100%. No Elvis impersonator sounds exactly like The King.

This brings up music, which is another showplace for human diversity. Think of the enormous variety of musical genres – bluegrass, folk rockabilly, hip hop, blues, bangra, reggae, … once again the list is endless. And for each genre there are subgenera, like (I’m not making this up) latingrass!

And then for each genre there are endless groups that each sound different, and endless musicians, and endless songs. Music as we know it would not exist without this diversity, all rooted in human diversity.

Strength through diversity

The section title sounds like an advertising slogan for a bank but it’s true. Almost everything people do they do in groups and every group effort has a diverse collection of challenges. So it makes sense that the group has a diverse collection of individuals so that each challenge has people who can meet the challenge.

Every successful sports team manager, workplace executive, shop foreman, union leader etc (etc again) knows this. That’s why a team manager (e.g.) does not (if they’re smart) have a single set of criteria (like high batting average) for all their selections.

The Beatles provided a good example this when they fired their original drummer and brought in Ringo. The original drummer was young, good looking and a competent musician – like the other three Beatles. Instead Ringo added to the diversity in that he wasn’t conventionally good looking, couldn’t sing very well, was an idiosyncratic drummer, and had a very different personality. It was a brilliant move and played a huge part in the Beatles’ success.

This brings up the elephant in the room, namely the selfish gene theory. According to this theory genes compete among themselves for a uniform criterion of success.

I am sure it’s false because it would lead to uniformity and kill diversity. There’s no way humans would evolve to be so diverse if we were left to the mercy of selfish genes.

Doom of the dinosaurs

What happened to the dinosaurs? The conventional wisdom (repeated uncritically by popular science media) is that a large meteorite struck in the Yucatan peninsula and the resulting tidal waves, storms, atmospheric disturbances etc. finished off the dinosaurs.But there may be more to it than that.

Charles Officer and Jake Page, in The Great Dinosaur Extinction Controversy put forth another theory. In their view, the culprit was more likely the volcanic activity of the Deccan Traps. Metorites or volcanos, there was one extra factor: the collapse in the diversity of dinosaur species. By the end of the Cretaceous era every ecological niche was dominated by one species. For example, T. Rex dominated the predators. This weakened the whole dinosaur super-species to the extent that the changes in the environment due to the volcanic activity (or whatever) wiped them out. When they lost diversity, they lost their strength.

Dinosaurification can be found in the modern tech economy. Clayton Christensen in the famous book The Innovator’s Dilemma describes how a successful company can fail because they uniformly commit all their resources to their One Big Idea and neglect new, disruptive technologies.

Better living through diversity

It’s fine to philosophize about diversity and corporations and sports teams but what about day-to-day life? Does this have any practical use?

It certainly does, and personally when in my own life I’ve practiced diversification (usually unintentionally) it served me well.

When I was a math student at UBC I was lucky because math was in Arts (I have a B.A. !). As a result I was forced to/chose to take second year English, Ancient History, and Spanish. I really benefitted. I struggled with English till I hit on the idea of getting a bunch of filing cards, writing a (diverse) set of quotations from the works we were studying on them, and memorizing them. When I took the exam I was able to write things like “as the poet says, …”. This really impressed the examiners!

When I arrived at Berkeley I naturally made friends with other math grad students. But from the start I was determined NOT to hang out exclusively with fellow math geeks. As it ended up my two best friends were a Jewish/Italian/French/Lebanese math student and a native Californian pre-Law student. I even had friends who were – wait for it – not students!

I also consciously chose a variety of activities besides studying. That included the game of Go, guerrilla theatre, and the Berkeley SDS chapter. This all led to a wonderfully diverse experience.

And so on

By now it should be obvious that diversity is a very diverse topic. I can mention languages, cuisine, art, fashion, and technological innovation.

Consider, for example, the fate of innovation in the old socialist Soviet Union. They had a money economy like their capitalist rivals (they didn’t practice real communism). But they thought they had an advantage because production was centrally planned. However central planning favours uniformity.

That meant they could concentrate on areas like space or chemistry, and that worked well. But no one was exploring diverse alternatives, like (vitally) computer technology. Thus the USSR missed the boat on that one while silicon valley struck paydirt. It’s not clear if you can plan diversity in the most general sense.

Of course there were people who had way out ideas like personal computers. But there was no private investment and anyone with an idea had to get support from the government. And this was usually futile because, for example, personal computers were not part of the current plan.

It’s only fitting that the same process that lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs put an end to the USSR. The Soviet managers had become dinosaurs.

In all this talk of diversity I may have given short shrift to uniformity. We need uniformity to get anything done. A sports team has to be united in the desire to win, a programming team has to be united in the goal of getting the product out the door, a band has to be uniform in rhythm, melody and lyrics (up to a point …).

So when do you practice uniformity and when diversity? There’s no uniform recipe. There are various fallible heuristics but in the end, you have to “know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em”.