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I mean really, it's ridiculous. It's exciting, this ridiculous complicated existence, but sometimes it's just too much to try to think through. Diversity and change are good examples of things that can be really hard to think through.
My automatic response to why there's a diversity of cultures is that there's a diversity of human beings. Why is there a diversity of human beings? Because of accumulated changes in alleles, which happen partially at random, partially because of other changes in other alleles, which leads me into rant on homozygosity, bottlenecking, and cheetahs. So, we [I; I refer to myself in plural a potentially disturbing amount of the time] have decided that humans are different from each other the same way they're different from any other species only... uh, the same species. That made perfect sense. Let's roll with it! So if all humans (save for identical twins and the clones I wish the government secretly had) have different genetic material, then it doesn't seem too strange to think they think would differently. We are removing the environmental variable at the moment because that would just start a whole 'which came first, the chicken or the egg' cycle and I can't do that right now.
Even people who have similar ideas don't think the exact same thing, and no matter how much humans attempt to cultivate a hive mind that is, to my knowledge at this moment, mind-bogglingly improbable. I think at this point I was going to say something about populations? Gene pools? Something about the bone marrow registry and genomic medicine, Tibetans (they are really popular in our class, hm?), and probs something about Basques (which makes me think about Finnish, but that's all language-- can I talk about that right now? Language is culture, and culture is language, but once I start talking about language I'll never shut up). I get so caught up in looking at things that I forget what I was originally meaning to say. But I'm guessing that the above words were all meant to be examples of genetic differences that become an obvious part of cultural differences.
Okay, so diversity is because of genes, the differences in which are caused by change but also cause change. So cultures change the same way alleles in a population fluctuate: breeding. One aspect of a culture that is popular is selected for, and so is passed on to the next generation, but something may happen and it becomes less favorable, or the next generation may just decide to hell with it, or it may carry on.
As for how we can make sense of such changes? I don't know. I doubt any human really knows, or cultural change would be more fluid and acceptable than it is now (or ever was, and may ever be). Change is difficult. It's annoying. It's exciting. It's disappointing. It's confusing. It's consuming. It's enthralling. It's whatever we make it to be, or whatever everyone else makes it to be and we get stuck with. It's ridiculous and goodness knows I can't understand it, no matter how intense my love-hate relationship with it is. We apologize if that's not satisfying for you, but it's all we've got.