I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

Whatever the challenge is, some people in our population are going to be well suited to meet that challenge.

So I think the diversity is actually really important.

Cultural diversity is important too because, again, that bag of tricks that we bring with us that we pass down to generation to generation, that cultural set of solutions, we also want to be able to pull on a really wide variety of those tools as well.

And so that's the beauty of the globalized kind of intellectual marketplace today

is we can bring solutions from anywhere.

But that biological variation is also important too.

That's anthropologist Herman Ponsor,

whose new book explores how it is that unlike most other land animals,

we can live almost anywhere from deserts to mountains, rainforests, even the Arctic.

We're supremely adaptable.

And that adaptability has led to our diversity.

We're diverse not only in our biology, but also culturally, both of which, he says,

have contributed to our success. I'm glad to be talking with you today because diversity has

become a dirty word in some quarters, and yet diversity is, I think, in your view, extremely

important for our success as a species.

Yeah, it's the original human superpower, you know.

What other primate has been able to thrive in every corner of the world?

And it's because, you know, of this diversity of strategies and, well, biological diversity as well as sort of,

you know, cultural diversity that makes us able to do that. So as an anthropologist, it,

you know, breaks my heart that diversity somehow has become a dirty word because that's,

it's our superpower. And yet you indicate in your book adaptable that focusing on differences can be harmful what are some of the

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