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But we don't know enough about the history of each molecule, and we probably never will, so it all seems random to us.

So you are saying it's "all in the chemistry?" PH, I'll buy into that -- provided you can explain to me how the Periodic Table of the Elements acquired its properties. Or are we to understand that the Table is itself the product of a random walk?

I get the strange feeling that people who do not want to look at beginnings, or first causes, are like folks that come into a movie theater after the film has already started rolling; they speak and act as if they believe that the film actually began when they got there. What happened before their arrival simply doesn't matter. But in actuality, the film's entire set-up can be found in the portion of it that wasn't seen by the late-comer. Absent that set-up, it wouldn't be at all unusual for the movie goer simply to believe and say that everything he saw after his arrival was "random." He would of course strive to make sense of it; but he'd be missing information critical to a proper understanding.

Be careful not to confuse the arrangement of atoms by atomic number (periodic table) with the properties of various elements.

So you are saying it's "all in the chemistry?"

Yes, I'm saying that mutations are all in the chemistry. And physics. Certainly. But the causes are too varied to be predictable, given our limited knowledge.

PH, I'll buy into that -- provided you can explain to me how the Periodic Table of the Elements acquired its properties. Or are we to understand that the Table is itself the product of a random walk?

If I can't scientifically explain the "why" of each element (if there is a "why"), how does that change the underlying chemistry of mutations?

I get the strange feeling that people who do not want to look at beginnings, or first causes, are like folks that come into a movie theater after the film has already started rolling; they speak and act as if they believe that the film actually began when they got there. What happened before their arrival simply doesn't matter. But in actuality, the film's entire set-up can be found in the portion of it that wasn't seen by the late-comer. Absent that set-up, it wouldn't be at all unusual for the movie goer simply to believe and say that everything he saw after his arrival was "random." He would of course strive to make sense of it; but he'd be missing information critical to a proper understanding.

Very good analogy. I'll have to remember that one.

... provided you can explain to me how the Periodic Table of the Elements acquired its properties. Or are we to understand that the Table is itself the product of a random walk?

I've been doing some searching, because I know we discussed something like this not long ago. I've found it here, post 257. And there's more at post 262.