The phrase "accidental mutation" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in contexts related to biology, genetics, or evolution to describe a change in an organism's DNA that occurs by chance rather than through deliberate modification.
Example: "The study focused on the effects of accidental mutation on the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria."
Alternatives: "unintentional mutation" or "random mutation".
They only sprung up by accidental mutation, not through any intent or purpose, which are both mental traits.
It holds that accidental mutation, random genetic drift, and natural selection together account for evolution.
However, I will show that there is another alternative, which has not been attended to yet, which is neither accidental mutation nor mutation that violates our core assumptions.
Furthermore, the aging-growth program cannot be switched off by an accidental mutation, because such a mutation would be lethal or at least reduce fitness during development.
All would agree that random, accidental mutation cannot be expected to suddenly produce out of thin air a large and complex beneficial change.
Furthermore, it is much easier to construct mathematical models under the assumption of random accidental mutation as opposed to nonrandom mutation, because then one does not need to add the structure to the mathematical models that would have been needed in order to describe nonrandom mutation.
Other features may simply reflect accidental mutations or functionally neutral changes in the genetic code.
On p. 94 he claims that assuming "accidental mutations provided the set of successive candidates on which natural selection operated to generate the history of life" makes "the outcome too accidental to count as a genuine explanation of the existence of conscious, thinking beings as such".
Novel adaptations may arise from junk DNA but it is not the neutral accumulation of purely accidental mutations that explains them.
It encouraged instead the very crisp perspective that adaptive evolution is based on supposedly accidental mutations that are normally beneficial as single units.
Indeed, there is no quantification of the amount of chance that we call upon to explain the evolution of adaptation (namely the chance that is involved in the arising of accidental mutations and in random genetic drift, to the extent that the latter is invoked)—a deep problem not yet addressed at all by the whole body of population genetics.
