i did neuroscience for grad school, and i was always amazed by how often complex neural activity could be well represented by lower dimensional representations--clean manifolds, attractor dynamics, etc. i think, in general, biology (evolution) doesn't penalize against redundancy too hard (hence things like genetic drift, neutral theory of evolution, etc.).

anyway, super cool stuff. agree with you that probs more useful to explore the search space via 'less natural' structures, given how forgiving evolution is to redundancy. probs where the most information can be found