In my provocation ‘Humanity in the Lab: Why Science Must Reckon with Culture‘, I hope to ignite the idea that science has an important role to play in solving global challenges but is hampered by its tendency to ignore the fact that what we do must be done for all of us, for all us humans, and that what defines humans is culture.

My name is Peter Mousaferiadis. I had a career for 20 years as a conductor, composer and creative director of some of the largest intercultural productions in the world before turning my attention to trying to understand this seemingly nebulous concept called culture.

If we are to solve the of challenges today we require both scientific precision and human understanding. As someone of Greek heritage, I know Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Aristotle and so many others blended science with philosophy, ethics, arts and culture, embodying this concept of unity of knowledge.

In China, thinkers like Confucius, Shen Kuo, Zhang Heng, and Li Shizhen also pursued knowledge that wove together philosophy, science, and ethics. In the Islamic Golden Age, scholars such as Ibn Sina, Alhazen, and Al-Kindi embraced a similarly integrated worldview – where understanding the natural world was inseparable from understanding the human condition.

This unity of thought was the norm across the world.

And yesterday during the opening we heard President of Nanyang Technological University, Teck Hua Ho, speak to how the world is becoming more interdisciplinary, and that we need to fuse information together and that this problem of lack of data coming together is a problem everyone has. The question he put to the audience yesterday has been resonating with me, What is the ultimate purpose of doing this work?

Before we can answer that question, we need to understand how we arrived at this point.

The Scientific Revolution and the European Enlightenment of the 16th and 17th centuries ushered in a powerful new era of discovery. Empirical methods, objectivity, and reductionism became the hallmarks of progress. These tools led to extraordinary breakthroughs but they also divided knowledge into silos.

Science became increasingly institutionalised, and the humanities were gradually seen as separate – even inferior – framed as subjective, while science was celebrated as objective. Universities mirrored this split, creating distinct faculties and disciplines. And so, a chasm emerged – one that still shapes how we understand the world today.

In ancient traditions, science and the humanities were never separate. They were both essential to understanding the human experience. The philosopher and the engineer, the poet and the astronomer –all sought the same truth: what it means to be human, and how we relate to the world around us.

As we now face deeply interconnected global challenges – climate, conflict, displacement, inequality – it’s time to reclaim that unity.

Peace – true, lasting peace – does not happen from understanding ourselves alone. It comes from understanding each other. We need systems that are wise enough to embrace diversity, and strong enough to hold it all together.

So before we can make sense of today, let’s zoom out even further. Let’s take a broad lens on what it has meant to be human over the last 200,000 years.

The human race can be defined by an ongoing flux of migration and conflict.

What has set humans apart is our capacity to adapt to the environment. The reason for this is because of our capacity for culture – our capacity to teach and learn from each other. We create cultures and we exist within them.

What do I mean by culture? I am referring to how we give expression and meaning to every aspect of our life.

The human race has been on a phenomenal, rapidly accelerating journey for 200,000 years and we, along with tardigrades, expanded to every corner of the globe. (Tardigrades are tiny water bears. Look them up.)

From 100,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE the global human population remained stable at about 1 million. The primary reason for this is that humans were living through an ice age.

The Ice Age was super critical in the development of the modern human. It led us to develop the capacity to reflect deeply.

At around 10,000 BCE humans came outside of their caves and began to cluster in bigger groups forming the first civilizations.

It took us about 12,000 years to reach 1 billion people in 1804.

It took another 123 years for the human population to double to 2 billion in 1927.

We became 3 billion in 1960,

4 billion in 1974.

5 billion in 1987.

In 1989, the bringing down of the Berlin Wall was described by political scientist Francis Fukuyama as the end of history as we knew it, the bringing down of barriers. It was also the same year that Tim Burner’s Lee gifted us the World Wide Web. Within 3 decades, the world experienced massive economic globalisation without globalisation of values and ethics.

We are now living in this super diverse world where time and space have become compressed and the ability to relate to each other has become more important than ever.

In 2022 we became 8 billion. The year Chat GPT exploded onto the market.

In less than 100 years, we’ve quadrupled.

By 2008, social media had exploded onto the scene.

Social media exploits a biological survival mechanism that has evolved in us over the last 200,000 years. FEAR. And it’s also big business. Algorithms are designed to keep us in echo chambers – not to liberate us, but to shackle us.

Combine this with well-intended social justice frameworks, and what do we get? A world where our identities have been flattened into one or two attributes – often policed and rigidly defined. Yet, as humans, we are extraordinarily complex.

Social media promised so much in helping us understand each other but instead seems to have made things worse. These two graphs show the rise of social media on the left, and rise of global conflicts on the right. A very similar trajectory.

We are dealing with rapidly escalating costs of conflict – up to $19.1 trillion dollars in 2023 according to the Global Peace Index, and according to UNESCO 75% of that conflict has a cultural dimension equating to more than 14.3 trillion.

Is there a correlation with social media? So my question is,

“If culture-based conflict is so ubiquitous, why are we not putting culture at the heart of all education, development and progress?”

Now, let’s layer in the cost of exclusion – the economic, social, and human toll of gender inequity, disability inequity, and racialised inequity. While these figures are only estimates, due to a lack of reliable data, what’s clear is this: the cost is immense, and it’s one we are all paying for.

And these numbers do not include the cost of organisational conflict that we experience on a daily basis.

So, you’d think that with all the incredible advances we’re making in science and technology, we’d be moving toward a better world – a more peaceful one.

And as we heard yesterday in the Opening Address by numerous speakers asking how do we harness this technology and brain power that exists within the Greater Bay area to make a difference and foster inclusivity so the world benefits.

But let me tell you, the data as you can see tells a different story. Peace is actually in decline, and it’s been steadily deteriorating over time.

Which brings us to a pressing question: what will be the impact of AI on peace?

If we resist the urge to rush its adoption – and if we design algorithms that are deeply aware that we don’t all start from the same place socially or culturally – then AI could actually help reverse this trend.

But if we don’t, we risk amplifying the very inequities that are already undermining peace.

So, what’s gone wrong?

I already referenced the European Enlightenment that spearheaded a lot of the amazing scientific progress that has enabled such rapid growth.

Not everyone was a fan of the Enlightenment.

This is a painting by the poet William Blake of Isaac Newton – one of my personal heroes, and a towering figure of the Enlightenment.

In Blake’s image, Newton is shown with a single-minded focus: drawing with a compass, absorbed in measuring and calculating, but oblivious to the living, breathing, swirling universe around him.

I’m not saying there are any scientists in this room like that … but I do wonder: in all of science’s incredible achievements – has something vital been left out?

Incidentally, when I see this painting, it reminds me of being on public transport, surrounded by people immersed in their phones.

Fixated.

Zoomed in.

Focused on something precise … while the world hums and pulses around them missing the opportunity for deep connection with the other and nurturing values such as empathy and compassion that President of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Nancy Ip, spoke to.

Yes, the arts can be integrated into the sciences and the humanities in medicine. Right now, medical interventions are costing us hundreds of billions of dollars, in part because they fail to represent the full spectrum of people around the world. Our biological differences matter, and so does the way we each respond to medicine. Ignoring that comes at a steep cost and an enormous missed business opportunity.

Now back to the painting. Blake’s painting isn’t just about Newton – it’s about a way of seeing. A way that chases certainty, fixes things into categories, seeks control.

But in doing so, science has often left behind complexity.

It’s complexity that defines the world we live in now. And if we ignore that complexity, we miss something essential – not just scientifically, but humanly.

So, let me ask the question Newton might never have thought to ask:

What is diversity?

Diversity is not just a social value. It is a form of complexity.

Complexity and diversity are intrinsically linked, because true complexity in any system – whether ecological, social, or technological – emerges from the rich interplay of diverse elements working in dynamic relationship.

Knowledge is based on the diversification of ideas.

Diversity is everything.

Today, diversity – often grouped with equity and inclusion – has, in many cases, been narrowly framed through the lens of social justice. While well-meaning activists aim to correct injustice, this limited perspective can sometimes unintentionally reinforce the very divisions and dynamics they seek to dismantle.

No one thing can be diverse.

Yes, diversity is an aggregate of two or more things and unfortunately we don’t understand this concept in it’s entirety.

In my culture when we translate the word diversity into Greek it literally mean difference.

Here is a diversity framework we’ve created with our organization applying 4 different metrics.

Let’s take language as a dimension of diversity and apply it to this framework. Let me take you through a framework we’ve been working with – one that unpacks what true diversity looks like beyond the usual checkbox metrics. It’s grounded in four key concepts: variety, disparity, balance, and mutuality.

Let’s start with variety. Imagine in one group we have two Mandarin speakers and two Italian speakers. In another group, we have one speaker each of Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Which group has greater linguistic variety? The second. There’s less repetition – less homogeneity. That’s essentially what variety means: the absence of sameness. It’s a simple concept and one we can build an algorithm for quite easily. But its implications are immensely useful when applied to people and cultures, not just datasets.

Next is disparity, which speaks to the distance or dissimilarity between elements – in this case, languages. Compare two different groups: the first group consists of speakers of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French. The second includes speakers of Italian, Mandarin, Arabic, and Cherokee. Which group shows greater disparity? The second. The languages in that group span widely different linguistic roots, geographies, and cognitive frameworks.

Why is this important? Because, as Richard Nisbett argues in The Geography of Thought, our ethno-linguistic backgrounds shape how we think, reason, and engage with the world. How we give expression and meaning to everything. Language doesn’t just communicate; it carries worldview, values, memory, and meaning. So when we increase disparity – when we bring together people from truly different cultural and linguistic backgrounds – we broaden the cognitive and experiential range in any conversation or decision-making process.

The third metric is balance. This is about how evenly distributed different elements are across the group or organisation. Let me put this into a practical scenario. How often do organisations say they’re “diverse” in Australia – only to find the finance team is predominantly South Asian, marketing is mostly light-skinned women, cleaning staff are from the Horn of Africa, and the higher up the hierarchy you go, the less diversity you see? Gender parity at the top? Sure. But that’s often where the analysis stops.

This one-dimensional approach can lead to unintended consequences and missed opportunities. Diversity becomes synonymous with gender, ignoring how gender intersects with ethnicity, culture, and class. I speak from experience. I once sat on a board with 10 men and 6 women. We worked towards greater gender balance, becoming 8 men and 8 women but I became the last remaining board member from a non-English speaking background – when there had previously been six of us. When this narrow approach to equity becomes the norm, it breeds resentment. That’s partly why we’ve seen the rise in the politicisation of identity and of movements like Professionals of Color, Asian networks, and identity-based affinity groups – because people are feeling sidelined, and they’re creating spaces where they can create solidarity to be seen and express the need to be included.

Diversity includes more than just gender.

Now, the final and, in my view, most critical metric: mutuality. I often say, you can’t be what you can’t see. Mutuality asks: to what extent does your organisation reflect the community it serves? If a system isn’t as diverse as its environment, it creates instability – tension. It simply can’t function optimally. his idea draws from Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, and even the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

In the health sector, where we’ve done significant work, we’ve seen this play out first hand. Health providers whose staff reflect the communities they serve see better health outcomes, fewer hospital admissions, and reduced costs in translation and interpretation services. Not to mention the impact on cultural safety, trust, and the socio-cultural determinants of health. Then there are the ethnopharmacological considerations – medical treatments that aren’t as effective or even safe for underrepresented communities because those groups were never part of the research or testing phase. That missed opportunity alone is worth hundreds of billions globally.

So I come back to this: focus on the environment. When you truly understand the environment – your customer base, your patients, your audience – it makes a holistic intersectional lens essential. Intersectionality is ideally a strategy for inclusion, innovation, and resilience.

This framework – variety, disparity, balance, and mutuality – reminds us that there is no quick fix to social imbalances and fractures. The work of addressing social problems is sophisticated, nuanced, and requires patience, because culture is not static. And neither are we. The environment is constantly evolving – and if we’re not evolving with it, we’re falling behind.

What about cultural diversity? What if I told you cultural diversity is intrinsically linked to human identity and is an area that science has grossly neglected?

If you wanted to develop a strategy to manage cultural diversity then what would that look like? What aspects of cultural diversity would you be referring to? Who would it be for?

Until 2014, cultural diversity was poorly defined, analytically neglected and in need of robust understanding.

So once you’ve defined cultural diversity and disaggregated it into various categories then the next step would be to develop a robust classification system.

All of you here – especially the scientists – understand the importance of classification.

Some of you might be botanists.

This level of categorisation – from kingdom down to species – is what we expect when we talk about plants.

And that’s for a good reason: humans make sense of complexity by organising it. Classification helps us know how to interact with something – how to care for it, how to work with it.

Differentiation matters.

If we take this level of care to understand the unique needs of the species of a moss rose as you see in the slide then …

Why don’t we do the same when we think about people and cultures?

We often talk about diversity in broad, vague terms – but real diversity isn’t about ticking boxes or clumping people into broad categories.

It’s about acknowledging the specificity of context, identity, history, and values – the same way a botanist would look at root structure, soil preference, or flowering patterns.

If we fail to do that, we make assumptions.

Like plants, cultures aren’t static. They evolve, hybridise, interact. They’re adaptive, alive, global – just like ecosystems – and plant taxonomies are constantly debated – but imagine if we didn’t use them. Plant taxonomy is especially vital to the conservation of endangered species. You can’t manage what you can’t measure.

So here’s a question for us as scientists, educators, and global citizens:

What is cultural diversity, really? When we think of the world what do we see?

Yes, we are all as unique as a fingerprint. The world is made up of 193 full member states and 2 non-member states, then there’s all the dependent and overseas territories, such as Macao SAR of China.

With our organisation we’ve identified:

• more than 11,200 languages, speech communities and their variations.

• more than 10,000 cultures, ancestral groups, ethnicities and tribes.

• more than 8,000 secular and non-secular traditions.

Now intersect that against a range of demographic dimensions and we all become as unique as a fingerprint.

Do we treat cultures with the same nuance we treat plants?

Every culture is a library of solutions to the human condition. Just like biodiversity, when cultural diversity is ignored, erased, or undervalued – systems become fragile.

It is because of the complexity of human identity that it’s important to have comprehensive datasets to ensure everyone is included.

When we don’t have inclusive datasets survivorship bias can get the better of us.

See this image of a plane riddled with bullets?

Some of you may already know the story of Abraham Wald, a brilliant mathematician who in 1938 fled persecution in Europe because of his Jewish heritage. He made it to the United States, where the United States defence force quickly recognised his talent and brought him into a top-secret project during World War II.

They took him to a warehouse filled with damaged bomber planes – riddled with bullet holes – and asked for his help. The military wanted to reinforce the aircraft but couldn’t afford to armour the entire plane due to weight and fuel constraints. So they pointed to the bullet-ridden sections and said, “This is where we need to add protection.”

Wald simply replied, “So what?” He wasn’t being dismissive – he was being brilliant.

He went on to explain: “You’re showing me the wrong planes. Show me the planes that didn’t make it back.”

Of course, they couldn’t – those planes had crashed behind enemy lines, been blown apart, or sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

And that was exactly his point.

The planes that returned were the survivors. The bullet holes marked the areas that could take damage and still make it home. The real vulnerability – the areas that needed protection – were the ones with no bullet holes, because planes hit there didn’t survive.

This isn’t just a story about aircraft engineering. It’s a useful lesson in survivorship bias – our tendency to focus on the visible, the successful, the parts of the story that made it back, while ignoring what didn’t. And that bias often leads us to make flawed decisions.

Let’s bring this into our world.

In our organisations, in our communities, in our policies – are we only listening to the voices that made it through the system? The loudest ones, the ones still standing?

Or are we deliberately seeking out the ones we’ve left behind?

True inclusion requires that we ask:

Are we giving visibility to all the voices? Whose voice aren’t we hearing?
Are we making decisions based on everyone’s experience, or just the ones we can see?
Are we unintentionally excluding people, perspectives, and experiences that could dramatically shape and improve our strategies?

Survivorship bias is one of the most critical – and dangerous – cognitive biases. It creates overly optimistic beliefs and faulty assumptions because failures, losses, and gaps are often invisible. And yet, it’s often in those invisible spaces where the greatest insights lie.

So if we want to build systems that are truly inclusive, effective, and resilient, we have to make space for what’s missing. We have to armour the parts that aren’t in the room yet – the voices we haven’t heard, the stories we’ve overlooked, the data we haven’t captured. That’s where real opportunity lives.

So what’s the crux of this story here? Foundational data is essential, because partial datasets can lead to disastrous outcomes.

What did we do with this insight in our organisation? After five years of bringing together a team of subject matter experts from a wide range of disciplines, we didn’t just define this often nebulous concept of cultural diversity – we built something tangible. We created the most comprehensive dataset in the world: The Global Database of Humanity.

We harnessed massive computational power to build a platform capable of delivering unparalleled insights – not just into the extent and type of cultural diversity, but also across a vast range of demographic dimensions. Crucially, this tool allows us to intersect those insights with lived experience, so strategies can finally be informed with the accuracy, depth, and nuance they deserve.

We disaggregated cultural diversity into four distinct areas, each with its own set of subcategories. Now, I won’t go into the full definitions today – frankly, that needs an entire session on its own – but it was important for us to get really clear on what we meant by each area. Once we had that framework in place, the next step was making sure we had the right data – data that was inclusive, representative, and ensured no one was left out.

We’re taking a citizen science approach to this, which means these datasets aren’t static. They’re living, breathing, and constantly evolving as people contribute and engage.

On top of those four core areas, we added another layer – additional dimensions that help us explore how our definition of cultural diversity intersects with the three other domains you see on the slide. It’s this intersectional lens that’s helping us move beyond surface-level diversity into something much deeper and more meaningful.

Every organisation has a cultural diversity index and this is the formula we created for it.

Now you can get your pencils and calculators out and calculate the diversity index in this room.

Human diversity is like a Rubik’s cube – only much more complex. You might line up one side perfectly, but in doing so, you throw the others out of alignment. That’s what happens when we focus on just one aspect of a person’s identity – we miss the bigger picture.

A holistic understanding of humanity means recognising that we are all made up of many layers. Everyone carries a unique, intersecting set of identities, and it’s in that complexity that our real richness and our biggest challenges lie.

The concept of a holistic approach is not new. In fact, in my culture, the word for peace is irini – derived from the verb iro, which means to string together in a circle all the essential elements into one, and a state of equilibrium.

Coincidentally, over 2,400 years later, the Global Peace Index echoes this ancient idea. It defines peace through a multidimensional lens – built on 8 foundational pillars and measured by 23 indicators. Like beads on a string or links in a chain, if one is broken, the whole is weakened. Peace is not a single condition – it’s a system of interdependent parts.

My work – the work of trying to understand the full complexity of human identity – has only scratched the surface. But I’ve dedicated the past 37 years to this journey, and I remain convinced that if we bring together the sciences, the humanities, and technology, we can begin to reverse the decline of peace.

Peace – true, lasting peace – comes not just from understanding ourselves, but from understanding each other. It emerges when we build systems wise enough to value our greatest asset: our collective cultural heritage, this is cultural diversity – the full spectrum of diverse cultural expressions and how they interweave within a well-functioning society – and strong enough to hold it all together.

What does this look like when the rubber hits the road? Thank you to the 29 participants who generously completed the survey, allowing me to show you. Following is a quick overview of the cultural composition of this segment of the conference today.