  Recent extensions of the Axelrod model of cultural dissemination (Klemm et al
2003) showed that global diversity is extremely fragile with small amounts of
cultural mutation. This seemed to undermine the original Axelrod theory that
homophily preserves diversity. We show that cultural diversity is surprisingly
robust if we increase the tendency towards homophily as follows. First, we
raised the threshold of similarity below which influence is precluded. Second,
we allowed agents to be influenced by all neighbors simultaneously, instead of
only one neighbor as assumed in the orginal model. Computational experiments
show how both modifications strongly increase the robustness of diversity
against mutation. We also find that our extensions may reverse at least one of
the main results of Axelrod. While Axelrod predicted that a larger number of
cultural dimensions (features) reduces diversity, we find that more features
may entail higher levels of diversity.
