[teacup50]

Imagine an underground lake that's never struck by the light of day, but is teeming with life.

Over millions of years, the species in that lake evolve ... and lose their eyesight.

In that environment, how much value is there in diversity of traits like color?

[civilitty]

That is a contrived counterexample that completely ignores the very basics of evolution and how changing environments help drive adaptation. Picking out one irrelevant trait here and asking if diversity is useful is like asking "how much value is there in diversity of spleens in the Rust Community?" They don't care about spleens, they care about people who are interested in Rust; just like natural selection favors organisms who can reproduce, not individual traits.

Natural selection will favor the animals who don't have to waste energy on pigmentation... until a billion years later when a sink hole opens up or one of the species evolves bio luminescence and all the organisms that lack pigments start to reflect all incoming light back at their new, hungry predators. That's the whole point: environments change all the time and the chance of a species surviving is dependent on the diversity of its members, just like the survival of carbon based life through a planetary mass extinction event is dependent on the diversity of species.

Evolution can only happen through random mutation so, by definition, any environment with evolving life forms is always changing unpredictably.

[teacup50]

How do you know the (heavily politicized, myopically chosen, inescapably coarse-grained) identity groups they're targeting offer a form of diversity that actually has value in the realm of Rust? Why do you believe that these identity group traits correlate strongly with intellectual diversity that is necessary for the project's health?

If anything, this process (and the efforts from which it stems) seem purposefully designed to eliminate intellectual diversity, in favor of a rigid monoculture maintained by empowering political officers in the enforcement of right-think.