There is also some fraction of the sea turtle population that goes in the "wrong direction" when navigating by the Earth's magnetic fields. I believe these individuals generally do not do very well. But... this natural variation might be what allows the species to persist even as the magnetic fields shift over millions of years. Being the rogue bee might be fine. Being the rogue turtle, well... it might be good for t…
There's also a famous clip from Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World where a penguin does something similar,[0] and I've seen it theorised (possibly in the book Empire Antarctica , but I'm not certain) that this may be a mechanism to find new breeding grounds (though, as you say, in a way that may be good for the species but is bad for most of the individuals so called). [0] https://yewtu.be/watch?v=zWH…
In the book A Mote in God's Eye, they have a concept of the Crazy Eddie (presumably named after the 'eddies' in fluid dynamics), which is a mythical social phenotype where the member disagrees with the status quo and believes there is an unknown solution to their thus-far unsolved generational problem. Simply believing in a solution that is worth searching for denotes the member as 'insane'.
Kind of seems like we, as natural beings and members of natural systems, absolutely have some kind of pattern-breaking behavior built in at a systemic level. A master-level emergent behavior that can exploit local maxima but still succeed in finding other local maxima to ensure the survival and adaptation of a species.