The Eggbeater Analogy

Need some other analogies to get the point across, that:

For most of history and prehistory, the trend in both biological and cultural evolution was toward diversification/speciation, all made possible by populations being more or less isolated from each other, and more or less staying put, becoming more and more finely tuned to conditions on the home range. [ *One effect in human populations is a kind of fidelity to and deep love of and identification with the ancestral homeland to an extent unimaginable to most people today.  This was a central feature, for example, among the many peoples living right here in California—possibly cite example of Owens V. Piutes “pining away from sheer homesickness and misery” when removed (NNC 14:4)] and thus leading to ever greater biological and cultural/linguistic diversity on the world scale.

Beginning with the Age of Exploration, when a few European superpowers of their day began to extend their colonial tentacles across the globe, and accelerating ever since, especially since World War II, the long-standing trend was suddenly reversed.  All has become restless, relentless, movement, diffusion, scrambling, and rescrambling . . . slaves, refugees, immigrants and emigrants, invaders, colonizers, genocide, weeds, diseases, pests, insects, all the multifarious colors of the world thrown into a hopper and the Universal Eggbeater applied and . . . voila, here we are.

There are two fundamentally different kinds of diversity, one real, one only apparent:  global diversity is rapidly decreasing, while thanks to the eggbeater, local diversity is increasing.  This increase in pseudo-diversity is apt to be short-lived, as cultural minorities assimilate and biological minorities go extinct, the ultimate result being a net decrease in global and local diversity.

One easy-to-see outcome of the grand eggbeater experiment is that the rich get richer faster than ever and the poor poorer.  The most invasive weeds, the most virulent bacteria, the most restless colonizers, all unleashed on the rest of the world from their small home islands.

And it works the same for languages and religions and world-views and economies as it does for weeds and bacteria:  those content to live and let live are soon no longer living, replaced by those whose goal is monopoly.