All people are different from each other. This fact seems so obvious that we rarely think about why this is so. Why is someone a night owl, and someone a lark, someone likes sweets, and someone bitter, some like men, others like women, and others are cramped in familiar gender categories. Neurobiologist David Linden assessed the degree of human diversity by studying profiles on a dating site. There, as it turned out, people are especially willing to describe their characteristics - from hair color to food and sexual preferences, from everyday habits to allergies.

"Why People Are Different" is an attempt to describe all the facets of our uniqueness in one book. Linden talks about genetic variability and environmental influences, from the womb to adulthood, about learning and individual experience, about immunity and chemical receptors, because of which there really is no accounting for taste. And even though you never doubted your own uniqueness, you will still be fascinated to learn how difficult and unpredictable the path you had to take to achieve it was.

“When the Jim brothers met, they were not alike in appearance or personality. However, there were some striking similarities. Both brothers worked in law enforcement, and in their spare time they did carpentry and painted. On vacation, they liked to drive their Chevrolets to Pass-a-Grille Beach in Florida. In school, both were good at math, but bad at spelling. Both married women named Linda, and then divorced and married women named Betty. Both had sons: James Allan Lewis and James Allan Springer. And, remarkably, both washed their hands before and after using the toilet.”

"When Mississippi alligators lay eggs, embryos that develop in the middle range of temperatures (90–95°F) will become male, while those that develop in temperatures above or below this range will become female. It is unclear whether a female alligator chooses where to lay her eggs to determine the sex of her offspring, or whether she can change her choice to prevent all offspring from becoming female as a result of climate change."

"The failure of autobiographical memory is not a bug, but a benefit. For a memory to be useful, it must be updated and integrated with subsequent experience, even if that experience changes the memory of the original event. This means that it is useful for memories to be plastic, so that they can be integrated into the present. In most cases, general memories that span many trips to the beach are more useful for future decisions and behavior than 50 separate, detailed, and precise memories of the beach. The loss of detail due to repetition allows the brain's limited resources to be used more efficiently."

"A tomato contains many thousands of different molecules. Of these, about 450 are small and volatile enough to end up in the air, where we can measure and identify them using a gas chromatograph. Of these volatile molecules, only 16 bind to specialized odor receptors that olfactory receptor neurons approach and reach the threshold of perception."

For whom
For anyone interested in genetics and human biology.