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Carey: So, to re-iterate my meaning: mutations may in principle be governed by deterministic laws, but they don't preferentially benefit organisms or rain down according to a grand design. Rather, mutation is the process that drives populations toward the thermodynamic equivalent of entropy, and natural selection is the process that ultimately resists localized entropy (while allowing universal entropy to increase by the release of metabolic heat, etc.)
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Fine post Carey—clear, concise, reasonably rigorous, not agonizingly longwinded. I hope MM, Tom, and Alex are observing and perhaps learn something. I suspect Alex will; but the other two may be a lost cause.
Anyhoo, it seems that we agree that mutation isn’t necessarily intrinsically “random,†but rather, currently, it seems to be unpredictable, at least by us humans based on our current knowledge.
Roger Penrose (in his
Emperor’s New Mind), who convincingly argues that human mathematical insight is non-algorithmic, and also doesn’t see how algorithms for mathematical judgment could evolve, writes: "To my way of thinking, there is still something mysterious about evolution, with its apparent 'groping' towards some future purpose. Things at least seem to organize themselves somewhat better than they 'ought' to, just on the basis of blind-chance evolution and natural selection." (p.416). (And others have said similar things.)