Diversification: Random Walk or Biological Determinism?

I expect not to stride out of subject. I find refferences to non biological evolution interesting, because they broaden the view. They may be particularly pertinent when talking about determinism and randomness. I, therefore would like to expand a little bit your refference to rocks and erosion.

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Is biological diversification like erosion? If so, then it would be a random walk.

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It could seem that erosion is just the destruction of rocks, but, at least in planet earth, it has been the starting point for soil building, that produced forests, and arable earth. So seen in that way, maybe it could be considered as rather deterministic.

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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.

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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?