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I'm intrigued by several general issues this conversation helped me to think more about. For both human genetic and language diversity there is evidence suggesting that older, founder populations exhibit greater diversity than the distributed populations to which they give rise. My presumption, without thinking much about it, was that this was because the daughter populations had made use of the initial diversity to adapt to new circumstances and so displayed less diversity. An alternative is that the older/founder populations weren't in fact more diverse originally; that the enhanced diversity simply reflects their age and hence time for random variation to occur. I'd like to know more about which is in fact the case. It goes back to the earlier discussion of whether diversity is random accumulation or in some sense represents "meaningful" experiences (ie is a product of selection).

Along these same lines, there was a potentially interesting distinction made between "evolutionary" potential and "biological" potential, with the former being understand to relate specifically to possibilities of future change in genes and their frequencies, and the latter to all possible ways in which organisms might develop and explore in new ways. And this in turn takes us back to earlier conversations. Does a "generalist" have greater potential to radiate into new species? Does a generalist have greater genetic diversity? Or is a generalist simply an organism in which a given genetic potential is less "canalized" than in specialists (birds have the genetic potential to create teeth but it isn't normally expressed).

Yes, I think all this has relevance to "conservation", at the very least by encouraging us to think more clearly about what it is we might want to "conserve" and why.