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So, is biological diversity random.... I guess when you boil it down, it has to have some random component from the mutations, but then the environmnet determines (in that mechanical sense) whether or not the diversity will increase.
Hy CS, yes, I thing that randomness is necessary to breed diversity, otherwise absolute determinism would only breed uniformity.
I also would like to point out, that some times, and I talk also for myself, we confuse randomness with unpredictability. A random process has a probability assigned for all the possible outcomes, be them known to us or not. Taking the typical random example of the die, the probability of having one particular number is 1/6, but, if we make a run of 6.000 tries, we will have very approximately 1.000 occurrences for each number. So the final outcome is prity much deterministic. Am I saying a barbarity?