Chewing of the cud #fundie reddit.com

This is an Enlightenment-descended idea so deeply embedded into modernity that it's hard to uproot.

The basic motivation comes from a good place. The idea is that diverse cultural and philosophical environments are darwinian, where only the fit survive and the weak die off. That's the way it is in nature, and the way it should be in human society.

But even in nature biodiversity's virtue is limited. Sudden introduction of foreign species is almost always enormously destructive, and does the ecosystem more harm than good even in the long term, often serving to reduce biodiversity--look at the introduction of the cane toad in Australia for example which has displaced many native fauna. Diversity is not everywhere and always good, and efforts to increase it often backfire. Lack of diversity is not the problem.

What's worse than lack of diversity is geographic isolation. Take for example New Zealand, which is quite biodiverse but due to its isolation has seen many native species disappear when inevitably some foreign species are introduced. In the human world this degree of isolation is very rare--maybe somewhere like North Korea.

At the very least, biologists recognize the sudden and artificial introduction of foreign species as a bad thing for the ecosystem. Why would we not consider the sudden and artificial introduction of foreign cultures a bad thing for the cultural ecosystem?

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Confused?

So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!

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