Essentialism: reducing complex facts to one dimension or principle
- Tendency to find one set of traits to explain everything
Part of our problem in understanding him may be our own unrealistic expectations. We may subconsciously expect people to be homogeneously “good” or “bad,” as if there were a single quality of virtue that should shine through every aspect of a person’s behavior. If we find people virtuous or admirable in one respect, it troubles us to find them not so in another respect. It is difficult for us to acknowledge that people are not consistent, but are instead mosaics of traits formed by different sets of experiences that often do not correlate with each other.
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Stability
Variation is an inherent and integral part of the human - or indeed any — genome. Nor does it make sense to take a snapshot at this particular moment in 1999 and believe that the resulting picture somehow represents a stable and permanent image. Genomes change. Different versions of genes rise and fall in popularity driven often by the rise and fall of diseases. There is a regrettable human tendency to exaggerate stability, to believe in equilibrium. In fact the genome is a dynamic, changing scene.
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