I should add that another way to consider this constraint is the good regulator theorem: every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system.

Through this lens, you can view an organism as an hierarchical collection of various models of its environment at different scales. As the organism specializes further, its model of the world can simplify, and it is free to explore simplification of some internal structures so that others can become more optimized for the more dynamic parts of the model which may need realtime updates, such as recognizing and tracking fast-moving prey. Various positive feedback loops result, and drive evolution.

It all comes back to the amount of free energy needed to predict the next state. In the information-theoretic sense, regularity lowers the uncertainty of the next relevant state given the system’s model. Specialization is what occurs when the system transforms that lower uncertainty into structure. This saves energy because the system has less ambiguity to resolve in realtime. But in the case of most biological organisms, it takes tens to millions of years for an organism's structure to react to its environment, so the cost of these "cheap reads" (metabolically speaking) on the model is an extraordinarily long, expensive and nondeterministic write process to update the model.

If an organism specifically allocates enough free energy to allowing rapid mutation while still constraining bad evolutionary paths, while metabolically expensive it can lead to organic evolution on the span of literally just decades:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/lizard-ev...

> The new habitat once had its own healthy population of lizards, which were less aggressive than the new implants, Irschick said. The new species wiped out the indigenous lizard populations

> Researchers found that the lizards developed cecal valves—muscles between the large and small intestine—that slowed down food digestion in fermenting chambers, which allowed their bodies to process the vegetation's cellulose into volatile fatty acids.

> The rapid physical evolution also sparked changes in the lizard's social and behavioral structure, he said. For one, the plentiful food sources allowed for easier reproduction and a denser population.

> The lizard also dropped some of its territorial defenses

The lizard not only developed a new organ to help it eat the local vegetation, but it exploited the regularity of dominion to reduce metabolic energy which was previously allocated for modelling an environment exhibiting territorial pressure from competing species.