Fighting for Diversity

On December 1st, 1640, a small group of conspirators storms the Palace in Lisbon and deposes the Spanish Governor, the Duchess of Mantua. The Duke of Bragança, head of the senior family of the Portuguese nobility accepts the throne as Dom João IV of Portugal, who was unanimously accepted as King by the people of Portugal. So ended a 60 year period where Portugal had Spanish Kings.

Why am I posting this on a technology blog? Because we easily forget how most of our success was driven by a simple nature's rule: diversity. When we reduce cultural and biological assets, we lower the solutions pool, reducing our capacity to evolve. As when we reduce the species by preferring cloned or transgenic individuals, where we are reducing the only way nature has to improve and survive.

As I'm presently implementing genetic algorithms to solve a global search problems, I found it harder to cope with models that minimize diversity and just throw away solutions.

The present globalization trend offers us new opportunities to change genes and ideas all over the world. Hope we are wise enough to do it, and resist to people that think we should have less cultures, less languages, less religions, less economical models, less political models, less ideas, less solutions to our problems.