> Evolution exhausts

So, the remark is not about evolution being passive, but that the ability to decide requires sapience? I think, decidability is elementary to programming and in that sense completely mechanic. Anything else is begging the question of free will and the jury's still out on that one, so your "of course" is illegitimate.

> Evolution exhausts the lowest energy possibilities first, before moving on to higher energy configurations.

that's basic arithmetic. You can't have all the other numbers without the first.

> higher energy, more expensive configurations.

Expense and state are not equal. First, energy from the current state has to be expensed to activate some process, that will in turn increase or decrease the energetic state.

> If any of those building blocks are "deprecated", perhaps this effects things up the line, leading to the probability that cheaper, more basic constructions will survive longer because they have fewer steps in a given dependency chain.

That's a non sequitur motivated by observation. The idea of entropy is from thermodynamics and I'm not fit at that, but I think it is just defined for closed systems. Same basic Issue as with the free will, it depends on your knowledge of the limits of the system. If you deem free will a thing, why would you consider a bigger system, that works on a much larger timescale than humans, that is virtually limitless, to have a lesser degree of freedom, ie. none?

In a sense it does, doesn't it? And even if it does not, it is a very useful mechanism to explain something: model it against other known things.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor