Anthropologists have studied human behavior in many very different cultures around the world. This has documented a broad range of culturally distinct behavior. It has also identified behavior that is consistent from one culture to the next.  These human universals, or near universals, form a long and interesting list of behaviors that range from simple to complex, obvious to surprising, and include both helpful and hurtful traits.

Perhaps this commonality is not surprising. The laws of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and economics hold uniformly true throughout the known universe. Humans everywhere share a common and complex anatomy, physiology, genome, and brain structure. Every person alive today descended from the San Bushmen who left their African village to populate the world only 60,000 years ago. Perhaps our common traits result from the strategies our selfish genes use to survive the clever competition they face on our remarkable planet.