mjsw on Nostr: I meant it in a way that adaptation and evolution are simply more complex than can be ...

I meant it in a way that adaptation and evolution are simply more complex than can be explained by epigenetics. I think your intuition on there potentially being something more than randomness involved is correct. Of course, it's heavily dependent on what lineage we're talking about. For example, bacteria replicate in enormous quantities that their adaptations & evolutions tend to be closer on the spectrum of randomness because one bacterium out of many billions is bound to pick up some semi-useful genetic element in a hostile environment and make use of it in some way at some point.

However, there's probably something else at work in larger organisms with longer lifespans and smaller population numbers. It seems almost as if there's a whole machinery that may be in place to sort of speed along, or help in some way, the adaptation process such that it's not entirely random. I'm only speculating on this because I don't really know, but it's based on the fact that cells are highly organized and have complex assemblies of proteins to do incredible things like copy all 3 billion base pairs of the human genome in a few hours. Naturally, non-protein-coding elements play a crucial role in this through scaffolding, regulation, and signalling and whatever else, and that also involves epigenetic methylation patterns.