A Guide to Human Biodiversity

When Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection was first forwarded, it challenged a suite of sacred values. Primarily, it challenged the notion that an omnipotent and benevolent god specially created humans. Today, Darwin’s theory challenges a different suite of sacred values, of which perhaps the most important is that all human populations have roughly the same distribution of socially valued traits...

Human populations are likely different in more than superficial ways. Not only do they have different skin colors, hair textures, body structures, and proportions of blood types, they also likely have different psychological propensities and sensibilities... It simply means that we inhabit a world that is diverse, with sundry types of individuals and populations...

Nevertheless, it is true that the humans who left Africa encountered radically different environments and were often exposed to them for many thousands of years (hundreds of generations). Some of the challenges these environments posed were solved culturally, but some were also solved genetically. And, therefore, humans around the globe, although sharing many recognizable characteristics and propensities, are different from each other because of both cultural and biological adaptations...

However, things get much more controversial when one attempts to apply this same Darwinian logic to the human mind. Because of this controversy, there is very little mainstream discussion about potential psychological variation among humans caused by recent evolution... This is very odd, to say the least, because the human brain is an organ just like any other and is not somehow insulated from the forces of natural selection by the skull...

For example, there is some evidence that Northeast Asians are more collectivistic, more interdependent, than other human populations because of both culture and genetics...

There is also copious (but not conclusive) evidence that human populations vary in intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, partially because of genes...

... Some of the findings of a science of human variation will violate modern sacred values. Human populations will likely differ on socially consequential traits such as intelligence, criminality, agreeableness, openness, ambitiousness, athleticism, spontaneity, and so on...

All serious scholars and researchers agree that human populations vary genetically because of genetic drift and natural selection...

The goal [of studying Human Biodiversity] is to understand human nature and human evolution and to seek answers to fundamental and fascinating questions of who we are and how we came to be. This is not possible without studying human variation...