(1) Science is committed to the universal. A sign of this is that the more successful a science becomes, the broader the agreement about its basic concepts. There is not a separate Chinese or American or Soviet thermodynamics, for example; there is simply thermodynamics. For several decades of the twentieth century there was a Western and a Soviet genetics, the latter associated with Lysenko's theory that environmental stress can produce genetic mutations. Today Lysenko's theory is discredited, and there is now only one genetics.    

(2) As the corollary of science, technology also exhibits the universalizing tendency. This is why the spread of technology makes the world look ever more homogeneous. Architectural styles, dress styles, musical styles—even eating styles—tend increasingly to be world styles. The world looks more homogeneous because it is more homogeneous. Children who grow up in this world therefore experience it as a sameness rather than a diversity, and because their identities are shaped by this sameness, their sense of differences among cultures and individuals diminishes. As buildings become more alike, the people who inhabit the buildings become more alike. The result is described precisely in a phrase that is already familiar: the disappearance of history.    

(3) The automobile illustrates the point with great clarity. A technological innovation like streamlining or all-welded body construction may be rejected initially, but if it is important to the efficiency or economics of automobiles, it will reappear in different ways until it is not only accepted but universally regarded as an asset. Today's automobile is no longer unique to a given company or even to a given national culture, its basic features are found, with variations, in automobiles in general, no matter who makes them.    

(4) As in architecture, so in automaking. In a given cost range, the same technology tends to produce the same solutions. The visual evidence for this is as obvious for cars as for buildings. Today, if you choose models in the same price range, you will be hard put at 500 paces to tell one make from another. In other words, the specifically American traits that lingered in American automobiles in the 1960s—traits that linked American cars to American history—are disappearing. Even the Volkswagen Beetle has disappeared and has taken with it the visible evidence of the history of streamlining that extends from D'Arcy Thompson to Carl Breer to Ferdinand Porsche.    

(5) If man creates machines, machines in turn shape their creators. As the automobile is universalized, it universalizes those who use it. Like the World Car he drives, modern man is becoming universal. No longer quite an individual, no longer quite the product of a unique geography and culture, he moves from one climate-controlled shopping mall to another, one airport to the next, from one Holiday Inn to its successor three hundred miles down the road; but somehow his location never changes. He is cosmopolitan. The price he pays is that he no longer has a home in the traditional sense of the word. The benefit is that he begins to suspect home on the traditional sense is another name for limitations, and that home in the modern sense is everywhere and always surrounded by neighbors.  

Today automobiles produced by different countries may have the same basic features because________.

The general idea of the passage is that________.