If I was taken from my home as a baby and successfully accepted into a traditional Maasai family,

I would grow up to be a completely different individual.

For those of you who don't know, the Maasai traditionally, our group of cattle herders living in Africa,

and their culture is about as different from mine as it gets. And if I was raised as one of them,

I'd be unrecognizable as a human today. I'd spend my days tending to cattle instead of editing

audio. I wouldn't be an atheist. I'd worship Engai. Instead of tattoos and earrings, I'd have stretched out earlobes and body

paint, and I'd be living on a diet consisting of milk, honey, meat, and cow blood. The least

vegan diet it is possible to contrive. So I'd have completely different looks, beliefs,

and behaviors, and there wouldn't be

much of the Macon you know left. And for the point I'm about to make, the specifics here

aren't really important. There's nothing special about the Messiah or me. What I want you to

notice here is that you could take any human baby and put them in any human culture, and as long as the

members of that culture didn't reject them outright, that baby would likely grow up to be a

remarkably normal member of that culture, which is to say a completely different person than they

would have been.

As a human, living in the human world, it's very easy to miss how remarkable this is.

There are a few weird things here.

First, across our range, our species varies more dramatically than any other in its behavioral repertoire.

The difference in lifestyle between a member of the Maasai and a New Englander like me

is far more dramatic than, say, the difference between a gray wolf in Russia and one in Canada.

And second, where the regional differences we see in other species that vary across a large range

are often genetically influenced, the regional differences in our species are hardly genetic at all.

...