Ian Malcolm rule

I'm guessing this is Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton?

Feels like a "so close to the answer" kind of statement that veers wildly wrong because of the false metaphor employed at the beginning.

Low populations are bad for evolution, actually.

And why wouldn't that be true? Larger population means more opportunity for mutation, more chances to evolve. Larger pops are usually more spread out, which means more diverse environments, which means varied pressures for selection, which means more diversity and more evolution.

Island species are ideally suited to test the nearly neutral theory. Both the colonization process involved in their evolution and the limited ranges offered by islands contribute to reduced effective population size, and we can expect drift to be a major force in their evolution. With this in mind, Leroy and colleagues4 investigated the genomic diversity of 14 island and 11 continental songbird species (Figure 1). They found that island birds are genetically less diverse than continental congeners and have smaller effective population size; they harbour a higher proportion of harmful mutations, and less beneficial mutations reached fixation over the course of their evolution.

So the metaphor is misleading and leads to bad conclusions. The internet should, and did, cause a huge burst of innovation as globally isolated people were able to connect and exchange ideas for the first time. Multiple new genres of music, film, writing, and games have been the evolutionary descendents of this early-internet swapping of "memetic material."

If it seems like thats died off now, its because the internet isn't a wild place of free evolution and innovation anymore. Like the natural world, it has been colonized by monied-interests who have monocultured it because thats simpler to understand and control from the top down, which is how the rich on top like it.

Doubt.

Innovation comes from people who are not content to put all of their energy into trying to be the most mediocre.

Most people want to be normal, and in a low tech society, the ones who view statistical averageness as some kind of virtue will be exposed to different creative norm-breakers depending on geographic location. This results in diversity among normie cliques - while they're each competing to see who can be the most mid, their definitions of mid will be different.

Even if the kind of humans that have the desire to be seen as normal were to all form a singular herd, the source of their previous diversity will remain. People who don't actively mold themselves to become statistically average will still be here, setting trends, attracting followers and haters.

Its likely that OP's author doesn't see things that way because they're in the camp that views conformity and the mediocre as virtuous.