What’s your authority for saying that?
Logic? the clue is in the name : “deleterious”
sorry for ending up in the wrong thread. Guess its one of those random insertion events. Now there might be a mighty moderator repair protein to put thins right 
Right, so those of us who get cancer can’t breed?
Most mutations make no significant difference: a few percent (at most) more or less of a protein produced. Most, but certainly not all, that do make a significant difference are bad.
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I was trying to make a point on how random events as such would impact on arguments regarding biological systems, to suggest there are additional mechanisms that would ‘deal with’ or ‘impact’ on the question of accumulated deleterious mutations. To my mind, this is obvious and hardly controversial.
“does Nature progress to a particular outcome, or is it truly random and thus any outcome may be possible and we cannot know this until it occurs?” As a further complication, the exact meaning of the question can be debated. A strict determinist might say that nature is progressing to a particular outcome, but that if things had been slightly different, it would proceed to a different particular outcome. Conversely, nature can be progressing towards a particular outcome, but we may not be able to know what it is until it occurs.
Another major challenge is how particular is a particular outcome. Gould emphasized unpredictability; Conway Morris emphasizes the constraints that lead to similar outcomes in evolution. There is much subjective judgement in assessing how “random” or “deterministic” things are, and the situation is not helped by silly claims that one or the other favors particular sociopolitical positions.
Whether a large mutation is likely to be advantageous or disadvantageous or neither depends heavily on “advantageous for what?” Organisms are currently functional in their environment. Changes away from that are likely to not be good for that setting, but may be essential if there’s a change in the environment. How severe is the competition? If there’s less pressure, the level of fitness required is likely to be lower.
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All actual outcomes are particular when they happen. Nature’s chaos is such that there is no way of predicting the outcome of indeterminate states which are the combinations of chance mutation and the necessity of natural selection. Niches in the distribution of complexity will be filled by the drunkard’s walk sooner or later.
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