Where Do Variety Comes From

In natural world, we see lots of variety. There are millions of types of molecules and another millions of ways they can be arranged (minerals formation). In biology too there are millions of types of organisms. Natural world is full of diversity.

Where do the diversity comes from? I will answer that in this article. 

The diversity comes from wildness. A wild thing is one that follow very few rules.

Natural world is diverse because its wild. Its wild because unlike humans its has to follow very few rules. 

These are mostly just physics rules, like conservation laws and second and third law of thermodynamics etc. The remainder are biology rules which are obviously for living things only.

Nature, as opposed to humans, is much less restrictive. It can process a lot more things and therefore can produce lot more diverse things.

Humans are very restricted even compared to other living things. We can do much less, as in things we can process, operations we can perform in our processes, and as a result in outputs we can produce.

Pick a pinch of salt between your thumb and fore finger, spray it on ground. See the pattern made by the grains. Do it again and a different pattern will be formed. Do it hundred times and hundred unique patterns will be formed. Now do it through a machine, an electronic one that can work without human controlling it. It will not form even ten unique patterns. Machine spray is much more uniform, much less diverse, than yours. Your spray is not wild, its not done naturally, its done manually, by you, still its much more spread on the possibilities space, much less uniform, than machine's. 

Nature do its work much more flexibly than you do. Wind for example can move in any direction, your hands cannot. Biology has limited what you can do. You don't have that many degrees of freedom that nature have. Your machines are even more limited than you.

Whats limiting what can be done is how many restrictions the work has to be done in, and how much intense each of the restriction is. The most lenient set of rules are physics's. Chemical rules are built on them and therefore are much more restricted. Biology has its own list of rules, its a long list, its also more intense in each of its rules. All the biology rules are built on chemical rules. At each level up types of inputs that can be operated on get reduced. As a result diversity in output get reduced too. Logical extension of this is, any machine humans make would be much more limited than humans in what it can do. Sure it will be able to do a lot more in quantity but only at cost of adaptability. It needs everything standardize.

All restrictions are likely to encounter stuff it cannot process. Its because the underlying natural world is diverse.

Applied to economy, where business manager is different than labour there will always be less diversity than where the two are same people. Its because in former there are two restrictions while in latter there is only one. This is why all pre-1950s farms produced much more diverse crops - more genes of rice for example - than now. They lost diversity at both ends: loans from banks introduced a third player hence even less diversity than above, and separation of management from labour due to higher scale of operations.

Diverse stuff is always low on output but more than compensate it in resiliency. Since it can handle more types and in more ways its better able to adapt to changing situations.

Large organizations are disasters because of this reason.

Diverse is also more fun. 

Arts are fun because of no set pattern i.e. because of variety it can be in. Streamlining boost output but kill fun in it.  

One never get bored watching wild natural view. A tree can break open any branch to start a new one. Therefore two trees of same species growing side by side are very different in structure. If they get "tamed" they are not much fun anymore. Your eyes will quickly drift to something else. See how auto-tuning is poisoning music field.

If all of your workers are strictly following SOPs then who will troubleshoot? Once streamlined they cannot just switch to handle non standard situations at a minutes notice. They will consume precious, may be critical, time to learn the basics of troubleshooting. 

Have a group of troubleshooters ready. Dont take routine work from them. Exercise them often to keep them sharp.