I don't agree with this analogy though. Who's to say if life evolved on earth all over again, we'd end up in the exact same place? Sure, some of the same adaptations would re-emerge. But some might not. And there might be extraneous mutations that had no effect on fitness at all but drastically changed the appearance of some subset of species. If we assume true randomness is involved then we assume evolution itself is going to deliver non-deterministic results, don't we?

To put it in terms of genetic algorithms, we could run through N generations M different times and get different results each time.

To me that makes it seem like saying "randomness is an important aspect of evolution" isn't so far from the mark.