First of all, nothing in the paper proves that mutations are not random. Here is what is stated:

>... but it also points to a possibledeterministic approach to genetic mutations, currently believed tobe just random events.

This is an extremely bold statement to make and is purely speculation at this point (as described in paper).

Basically, we already know that mutations happen in nature, but scientists don't seem to agree exactly why and how all mutations happen. We know that radiation can cause mutations because we've seen it happen and seem to understand the mechanism of action. We know that viruses tend to mutate over time too, but speculating that mutations are deterministic based on the available dataset is an outrageous reach.

Since you're like 14, think of the paper as presenting a duality or inverse conjecture of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, only instead of entropy we have information. The thing that most people probably won't pick up right away is that entropy and information are basically the same thing in different colored clothing. So essentially, the paper re-words the second law of thermodynamics to apply to information makes a general hypothesis that this applies universally. It doesn't actually *prove* anything, and if it did, it would be the first successful proof by example. It does however show that the hypothesis does seem to hold in two different types of systems and demonstrates the relation between them.

So how does it relate to mutations again? Long story short, this leads us to believe that we can perhaps reduce the search space for likely variants of viruses' mutations (and perhaps other systems) by calculating probabilities. This isn't exactly something extremely novel, but now that it has been formalized it can be used more effectively.