Thanks for your response. Unfortunately the topic sentence of your response appears to have a strategic typo.
Did you mean to say you would expect just “the opposite” sort of thing...
Or, did you mean you’d expect just “this” sort of thing...?
Funny but that was a “random mutation” that seems not to have benefited your evolutionary thought process.:)
Ha. Sorry about that. Random mutation leading nowhere. I meant the latter: “I would expect just this sort [of] thing from a random process, regardless if it is modulated by a selection mechanism.”
A random process allows the second law free reign, whereas a directed process attempts to curb that law. Because the energy is “seeking” the steepest slope, I infer that it is doing so because a random process is driving it. A directed process would attempt to lessen the slope. But, I am merely conjecturing, and have not made a clear study of this. I do know that entropy relies on randomness - like in the dispersion of a gas. All the gas particles have random vectors, they bang into one another, and so they tend to spread out evenly. Therefore, randomness -—> increase in entropy.
I think the damaging effect that random mutation has on the non-random information medium of DNA is inhibited by natural selection - the environment tries to make sure that good information is passed on. And I think that’s all that natural selection is: a mutation-preventing guardian. I don’t think that neutral mutations are necessarily neutral, either, which natural selection cannot prevent. The accumulation of many neutral mutations could create a barrier to otherwise neutral mutations in the future. IE, what WOULD have been neutral no longer is. I don’t think this is a pathway for morphological novelty, however. (That is, many neutral mutations, and then a ‘key’ mutation that ties all those mutations together to form something coherent and useful.) But in any case, I haven’t done a proper study of any of this, so I may be wrong. Then again, I might not be. :)