There's an interesting pamphlet you might look at called Race and Culture by Levi-Strauss. The thesis is that we gain something of value when we learn from other cultures that goes beyond what we learned. The fact THAT we learned is an enriching experience. Paradoxically, he concludes that the more we learn and assimilate from each other, the less we have to learn.
On another track, I have some interest in evolutionary programming (EP). I wrote a program in Visual Basic (VB) once to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) using a very trivial EP. It's really cool to watch the solutions 'evolve.' However, I noticed something when I ran the program. While the solutions were certainly better than anything I (or probably any unassisted human) could devise, there was almost always a point in the 'final solution' where a human eye could see a very clear improvement. The system would always converge to a solution that was very good, but very clearly sub-optimal.
At a conference a while back, I talked to one of the world's experts on the subject (Ken DeJong) and asked him if he had any idea what could be happening. Turns out what I was doing in my algorithm was killing off all the sub-optimal solutions after every round. That's *NOT* how evolution really works. There is a chance that the most fit individual will get hit by a falling asteroid, or that a poor specimen of mammal will stumble into a particularly hospitable environment. It's sort of a counter-intuitive notion, but it suggests that an optimal solution FOR THE COMMUNITY - over a long time - is not necessarily composed of all the most optimal individuals. (I intend to get back into this soon, but this particular project has taken a backseat to my other interests for now.)
I don't claim this proves anything. I do think it suggests how diversity could be highly advantageous for a population.
OTOH, there is this other thing called Multiculturalism, which is a sort of artificial attempt to bring people together. While I strongly favor multiculturalism writ small - personal interactions among people, I can't say that I have anything but mistrust for government or university programs to jumble everyone together and see what kind of soup they get. It all seems too forced to me, too artificial, and usually too shallow. (My opinion on this has resulted on more than one occasion in my being accused of racism, ethnocentrism, elitism, insensitivity, ignorance, intellectual pusillanimity, crypto-fascism, and a lot of other things that were less humorous. Any attempt on my part to dissuade my accuser is met with the standard phrase, "Oh, yea! I'm sure you have *lots* of noneuro friends!" This is always an odd situation for me to find myself in, because until quite recently I had very few American friends. In fact, at my wedding my grandfather asked me, "Son" - he called his grandson's 'son' and his granddaughters and daughters 'sister' - "Son," he asked me, "do you have ANY American friends?")
Diversity is a very important thing - biologically, culturally, personally. But I'm still pretty much of mind that it's a journey on which individuals will learn more from their own drive for enrichment than external threats from the pointy end of a pitchfork.
k
