the.com/degeneracy

means The state of having lost the qualities or standards that once defined something, or — in a more technical sense — the condition where multiple distinct states or solutions end up equivalent or indistinguishable.

from From Latin 'degenerare,' to depart from one's race or kind, built from 'de-' (down, away from) plus 'genus' (birth, kind, stock). The original image is a lineage falling away from its noble ancestry — a family, or a species, sliding below what its blood promised. English borrowed it in that moral sense ('degenerate times'), while mathematics and physics later bent it into something quieter: not a fall from grace, but a collapse of distinctions, where paths that should differ end up — almost scandalously — the same.