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The inverse operation is ethnic cleansing, it even matches the metaphor. It's unpopular enough that it doesn't happen practically ever, but it's not a hard physical law like entropy.
Stepping away from race, it isn't irreversible for culture either. Spend a few generations sending all the nerds to the Bay Area, the creatives to Hollywood, and the performers to Broadway, and you can create local concentrations of cultural traits that are far outside the national average. It may not be ethnogenesis, but it's certainly the creation of something.
How is ethnic cleansing the inverse of race mixing? After all, don't both, if carried to their full conclusion, result in the territory in question going from two ethnic groups to one?
As you sort of note at the end of your comment, the true inverse operation is ethnogenesis. But how much can that really happen in our modern, ever more mobile, ever more interconnected world?
It depends on your exact definitions and which axes you care about.
Race mixing (and cultural exchange more generally) involves Group A becoming more like Group B (and vice versa). Ethnic cleansing interrupts and reverses that process, keeping the original group(s) the same.
Isn't the axis in question diversity vs. homogeneity?
So it reduces diversity, moving things in the direction of homogeneity.
So it (theoretically) prevents the process of homogenization — that is, when the ethnic group being "cleansed" from the area survives the process, and doesn't just end up being assimilated by whatever population(s) they end up living with after their expulsion.
What is the operation that increases diversity? Which makes Group A become less like Group B, and vice versa? And further, gives rise to Groups C, and D, and E, and makes all these groups more distinct, culturally and genetically? What, in this age of globalization, can truly make humanity more diverse?
(Other than space colonization, that is? Contolism — the real way to increase diversity.)
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I view that a little different, you can't unmix something which has already been mixed, but you can push it elsewhere and pretend that the problem has been solved.
Your example involves separating things, and it's not impossible for us to play Maxwell's demon and sort people, but society just doesn't take kind to the creation of spaces which excludes certain groups (not even toilets are exempt) so one is not allowed to reverse this process. Even if you make your own society kind of like the Amish, people will come and ruin what you're doing because the rest of the system has laws that it must enforce (for instance, it's illegal to collect rain water in some parts of the world).
If you move nerds around the world, the total amount of nerds does not increase. You're re-ordering what already exists, you're not creating something more. So if white people have less children on average, you can reorder them all you want, the ratio of white people will tend towards zero. And in America, men and women have a poor relationship. This is not the case in Japan, but is that not a manner of time? Once American culture really gets its grip on Japan (As it's trying to), do you not think gender relations in Japan will take the same path? Is the corruption of gender relations reversible?
To really create something unique, you must isolate it and leave it alone for a while. Kind of like petri dishes. Borders used to have this kind of effect.
It's not technically irreversible, but processes which generate certain things are very, very slow. Using money is faster than earning it. Cutting down a forest is much faster than growing it. Destroying trust is much faster than regaining it. Recycling anything back to its base ingredients is tedius work. It's this asymmetry which makes so many processes unsustainable.
If you wish to grow back something which used to exist, like "Uncontacted civilizations", "Untouched wild nature", "High-trust communities", "The wild west", etc. How long do you think it would take, if such a thing was even possible? Caning is currently a form of punishment in Singapore - if we stop this practice, do you think it will ever return again? If we ban gun ownership, will that ever return again? If we rise the age of consent, will it ever drop again? If all ownership is replaced with subscription models, will we ever go back again? Do you think the sexual revolution can be reversed?
True. My point is that once it has started, it can be stopped well before the finish line. Even a few decades is within the realm of physical possibility for cultural diffusion, or a few generations for genetic.
The "challenges" are social and political: One of the older attempts to unmix a population resulted in a bit of a dustup that killed 70-85 million people, while more recent ones are usually stopped before that point.
The creation happens in the years after the re-ordering takes place. Do you think growing up surrounded by nerds would be essentially similar to growing up surrounded by performers? Heck, do you think a mundane unrelated office job would be the same?
On a smaller scale, there's the idea of "startup incubators". They concentrate like-minded people together, forge connections, and hope to strengthen and expand their culture. I think the same thing can happen with culture in general when groups have a strong enough presence in an area.
Fair point. I was focusing more on years-to-centuries timescales. If you're thinking of decades-to-eons, then it's much closer to the bare truth.
"Maintaining the old" is only one half of diversity though. The Wild West came about from a mix of societies, Singapore combines multiple influences, etc. Generating new cultures is the other half.
I'm about 50/50 on your examples.
For gun control, see this gif: states went from mostly may-issue to mostly unrestricted concealed carry over the course of a few decades.
With the current push of sexual content onto school children, I'd be surprised if the age of consent didn't go down in the next couple decades, even if it's restricted to Romeo-and-Juliet laws.
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