From my personal experience, I believe that human variability specifically is a main focus of many fields, in an attempt to explain our differences. Furthermore, it is my belief that the underlying purpose for this has long been to explain race. I think that humans attempt to characterize and explain the differences they can see first and foremost, including but not limited to physical differences or skin color. Race has been a controversial topic for too long, but surprisingly to some, when we look at the many fields and sciences including research broadly, we can find that there is not much explanation for the physical skin coloration differences – at least not in terms of the way racists would like to think.

In my science classes and my own personal studies/beliefs, we have often discussed how the unifying theme is humanity, no matter what color, shape, size you are or language you speak. Alters and Alters statement suggests a similar notion of how we seek to understand ourselves and each other. In my major, there is a subfield directly related to evolution in which many of the behaviors, mannerisms, and even physical differences as I mentioned earlier, are “explained” by millions of years of evolution. Evolutionary psychology as a whole, then, attempts to explain our adaptations to our environment, in which differences can be explained because of differences in environment where humans lived, since we were able to successfully migrate across the whole planet. Oftentimes called the great human odyssey, evolutionary psychology uses the principles of evolution as applied to our understanding of human behaviors and thought processes. This relates to Alters and Alters comment because the field successfully captures the main goal of including human evolution into the field in order to understand the past, present, and one day, the future. For example, evolutionary psychology explains a certain phobia of predators. Having a snake or spider phobia may be directly linked to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, in which spotting these smaller animals was much more difficult. Over time (evolution), being able to quickly recognize and then react to these much more widespread creatures became advantageous to not getting bit than say, seeing a lion or bear. This idea is just one of the many concepts evolutionary psychology begins to explain.

In terms of regular old psychology, the field recognizes the differences that are apparent across humans. A main focus of this are sex and gender differences, which have come to light a lot more recently thanks to the ever-growing movement for equality. For a large portion of the literature and research, the field was dominated by white men (as is true for most things, I would say), and thus the literature remained being critical of women or minorities and overemphasizing differences. There was little to be known about the actual similarities that did indeed exist. Additionally, this field also has become better about how we present the studies we conduct and research we find. Most differences noted are exaggerated, but nowadays the discussion is much more clear for not just other psychologist, but for the general public. I think that although we do have differences, between cultures, individuals, and beyond, the sciences have come quite a long way in understanding and using evolution to better their respective research and explanations in human variability, but because of my prior knowledge of evolutionary psychology this week’s material did not change my perspective on it since it is just as dynamic as the people involved are.