Consider, we say cancer mutates to disable specific genes, but not how those genes are disabled because it's outcomes not methods that are so common.
You won't, though. There has been some excellent research on this done by amongst others Burmeister and Meyer in the Lenski group. Evolution is 'channelled' into certain solutions by its previous history and the process of co-evolving with other species.
For example: on of the papers by the Lenski labs show that the lambda phage evolves a certain defense mechanism very reliably in duplicated studies, despite it requiring several very specific mutations.
Also, saying you often get some set of mutations may be likely if subsets of those mutations provide advantages or there is some process that makes those mutations more likely.
True, but dice don't adjust their own shape so that they're more likely to stop at certain values.
> Also, saying you often get some set of mutations may be likely if subsets of those mutations provide advantages or there is some process that makes those mutations more likely.
Yeah, but doesn't take away from the fact that evolution is canalised into certain options (most of the time) by its own evolutionary history.
So, sure you can specify odds, but again that's very different than saying something is not random and thus predictable.
PS: I tend to focus on black swan events because they tend to be more important. If you focus on the most likely outcome that becomes less important over time. M1 - M10,000 might each be happy paths, but M1 - M10,000 is is extremely unlikely to have all of them be happy paths.