What is diversity?

There’s an image floating around the internet which (among others) shows the diverse colors of eyes and hair among European populations versus the rather uniform black/brown variation in Asian and African populations to show that true diversity is in Europe and not elsewhere.

This is so fascinating to unpack. For one, it shows the complete lack of knowledge of the full range of diversity in Asian and African populations. Africa is, like the urheimat of anything, more diverse in terms of human genetics than the rest of the planet combined. Everywhere else, humans experienced population bottlenecks that greatly reduced the genomic variety.

And yet! These outlying populations contain a fascinating amount of phenotypic variety. There are more genes for blond hair outside of Europe than within it. The Hmong people who range from central Asia down to Southeast Asia have one, the Solomon Islanders have another, and the trait has been observed in other isolated populations across the world, which likely developed the gene on their own.

I can sit here all day and dissect this particular diagram and the foibles within. That’s not particularly useful - because these are recruitment posters. They’re not meant for me, they’re meant to preach to a particular audience that wants to be seen as ‘diverse’. But the weird part is that this diagram presupposes that diversity is a good thing. Which is kind of mindblowing when you see that it’s a recruitment poster for White nationalism.

There is some evidence that diversity is a good thing - and an overwhelming amount of evidence that it is not. If you want to focus on research around working groups - homogeneity helps in manual labor tasks. You’re able to better predict the capability of each worker, the norms that govern space-sharing when everyone comes from the same place. Diverse groups tend to perform better on divergence tasks - coming up with a bunch of uses for a box of nails, for example.

Here is a linguistic map of my home state in India. The amount of linguistic diversity in one place boggles the mind. Europe simply does not compare on this axis.