The topic of evolution and adaptation always leading to progress has been discussed previously. I and others have pointed out that this is not the case. Here is a quote from Nobelist Richard Lewontin:

Richard Lewontin. 2005. “The Wars Over Evolution,” The New York Review of Books (October 20): 51-54

However, it is not the ideology of progress that has characterized evolutionary theory, not even at its nineteenth-century origins. Rather it was change, ceaseless change, that was the ideological leitmotif of a revolutionary era.
.. .
Ronald Fisher in England was an advocate of eugenics, and both he and Sewall Wright in America formulated the principle of natural selection as a process of increasing , from generation to generation, the average fitness of members of a breeding population. Yet these formulations make no predictions about a general progress of the species.
This may seem odd, since the process of natural selection is supposed to make organisms more fit for their environment. So why does evolution not result in a general increase of the fitness of life to the external world? Wouldn’t that be progress? The reason that there is no general progress is that the environments in which particular species live are themselves changing and, relative to the organisms are usually getting worse. So most of natural selection is concerned with keeping up. Certainly quite new kinds of making a living have been occasionally exploited in evolution, but every species eventually becomes extinct (99.9 percent already have) and no way of making a living will be around forever. [(4) Indeed, life on earth is about half over. It has been around for about two billion years and from our knowledge of that changes that occur in stars, the sun will become a “red giant” destroying the earth and other planets in another two billion years or so]. Judging from the fossil record a typical mammalian species lass roughly ten million years, so we might expect to last another nine million unless, as a consequence four immense ability to manipulate the physical world, we either extinguish ourselves a good deal sooner or invent some extraordinary way to significantly postpone the inevitable.
One of the most-cited results in evolutionary biology is the study by the University of Chicago biologist Leigh Van Valen of the longevity of Tennyson’s “types.” Van Valen reasoned that if there is a general increase in the fitness of organisms then the length of time between the first appearance of a kind of organism in the fossil record and its eventual extinction should increase over the long run of geological tie. But that is not what has happened. He found that the average length of time from origin to extinction of an invertebrate, as measured in the fossil record, has not changed over evolutionary time. We have no evidence that this is not true for species in general. So despite natural selection, things are not getting any better over the long run. Van Valen called this phenomenon the evolutionary “Red Queen,” after the character in Through the Looking Glass who found it necessary to run constantly just to keep up with a world that was constantly moving beneath her. Unfortunately, in real life, the Queen inevitably will tire , stumble, and be swept away.


Bernard