[gajomi]

"Diversity" may be an emotionally charged word, but also is a useful and common word in the biological sciences for a number of purposes. Of note especially is its common usage in ecology relevant to the CDC's goals of cataloging diverse bacterial and viral infections from clinical samples.

[somebodynew]

I would argue that in a biological context the primary problem with neutral uses of "diversity" is vagueness. If a report indicates that they "collected a diverse range of bacteria for study", what is it that's different about them? Why not say "collected bacteria with various tolerances to extracellular ethanol concentration across three genera"? But like I said, an outright ban is silly, there are certainly places where it's the right word to use.

[gajomi]

It is a problem, but a technical problem thats well understood within the relevant communities. A quantification of "various tolerances" is one notion of diversity, but as you have deftly pointed out there are many other quantifiable notions that are endlessly debated (some links in the context of ecology: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C48&q=%22...). Usually "diversity" is reported in terms of well defined quantitative metrics so that even if the umbrella term "diversity" is ambiguous it typically has well defined meaning(s) in the context of any particular study. All of which is to say, I would wager that the vast majority of scientific reports (and perhaps also those coming from the CDC) use the term "diversity" to introduce a general concept of a measure of heterogeneity which is quickly made precise within the study.