Evolution Is Not Random
A new study shows that genetic mutations that drive evolution are not, in fact, randomly selected.
Phys.org just published an article on a study, “Mutations driving evolution are informed by the genome, not random, study suggests” - opening with:
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by scientists from Israel and Ghana shows that an evolutionarily significant mutation in the human APOL1 gene arises not randomly but more frequently where it is needed to prevent disease, fundamentally challenging the notion that evolution is driven by random mutations and tying the results to a new theory that, for the first time, offers a new concept for how mutations arise.
CACHI actually has a conceptual foothold here, and supports its claims of (for example) fine-tuning.
The new APOL1 study claims mutations arise “where they are needed,” which shakes the dogma that mutations are purely random “copying errors.” That sounds almost Lamarckian, but the researchers aren’t saying DNA edits itself intentionally. Instead, they’ve found that the probability distribution of where mutations occur is skewed by contextual pressures—disease environments, population histories, etc.
CACHI treats reality as emerging under dual constraints:
The substrate (the physics of DNA replication, error rates, chemistry).
The informational negotiator (the CHI process that favors stable, complexity-preserving histories).
When you extend this into biology, the genome itself is part of that negotiation. Mutations that would annihilate complexity - ie. by destroying organismal viability - are phenomenally rare in lived history because they push lineages into unstable branches. Meanwhile, mutations that absorb volatility (like HbS against malaria or APOL1 against trypanosomes) are disproportionately represented in conscious history. They become more likely not because the chemical machinery bends to “need,” but because branches where those mutations arise and stabilize are preferentially inhabitable.
So under CACHI, what looks like “nonrandom mutation” is really branch-selection pressure: across the multiverse, mutations happen everywhere, but the only timelines that host ongoing consciousness of human populations are those where genomic changes stay within the tight tolerance band of complexity homeostasis. This makes adaptive mutations seem to appear “on demand” in retrospect, because the alternative branches - where they didn’t arise and whole populations collapsed - aren’t lived or remembered.
That ties neatly into the formalism of CACHI: deviations in information structure outside the CHI set point are filtered out of phenomenal continuity. In evolution, that filter operates across generations, so the “mutations we experience” are already pre-screened for stability and usefulness.
It’s basically that CACHI provides the informational explanation for why “directed mutation” appears true in evolutionary history, even while chemistry at the substrate level stays stochastic.