Why do people look different from each other?

we have over 99% of the same DNA from you to me, but that 1% is what causes us to look different from each other! The 1% of those genes are the instructions for eye color, hair color, head shape and face shape, height and weight, fingernail shape and ear shape. Of course, what we eat and what we do throughout our lives can affect this, too.

We look so different to each other precisely because we are a single race that happens to be a social species in which it is often vitally important to be able to quickly identify individuals from one another.

As a result we evolved cognitive biases that enable our brains to quickly recognize and pay attention to what are actually objectively very small differences between us, while simultaneously ignoring the huge number of features we share in common, which would otherwise serve to confuse our attempts at identifying individuals.

Very few other animals are actually capable of recognizing the difference between two random humans.

The converse is also true. When an untrained human looks at a herd of Zebra, or elephants, or dolphins, etc, all of them often look very much alike, but the zebra, elephants and dolphins themselves know exactly who’s who and can recognize each other instantly.

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