That's a very interesting hypothesis, thank you for the link. However, it doesn't seem to support what you're claiming about mutations, from my cursory reading. Can you provide a source for this claim that random mutation is a bad source of variation?
http://extendedevolutionarysynthesis.com/about-the-ees/why-i... explicitly rejects the idea of a revolution regarding mutation and other genetic sources of variation:
> How can the EES seek 'profound change' and yet disavow 'revolution'?
> All recognized causes of both evolution (e.g. natural selection, genetic drift, mutation, etc) and inheritance (e.g. genes), as well as the vast body of empirical and theoretical findings generated by the field of evolutionary biology, are accepted by the EES.
> Hence the EES does not entail a rejection of current understanding within the field, and does not require revolution. The EES seeks only to supplement the existing causal framework through recognition of additional causes of evolution (e.g. developmental bias) and inheritance (e.g. epigenetic inheritance), entirely complementary to those long-established within the field. Nevertheless, should these additional processes prove to be important, the conceptual change to evolutionary biology could very well be fundamental.
Although not in your source, I did find the following. Known as Drake's rule: as a genome's size increases, the mutation rate also tends to decrease. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_size#Drake's_rule. A recent update to Drake's rule suggests that mutation rate is also negatively correlated with population size too, not just genome size (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3494944/). And another interesting article about mutation in reproduction: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15183 (somatic mutation is two orders of magnitude higher than germline mutation). This is intriguing, though I have to wonder how the genome ever grows if mutation supposedly becomes so strict over time as to become a non-factor (transposons, gene duplication?). It's worth noting that mutations do occur more frequently in non-coding sections of the genome, which may not be accounted for in the studies I've linked to.
Still, regardless of my sources, I would like to see you provide support from specifically EES proponents for the devaluation of mutation as a source of genetic variation, as you implied.