The Goal of Evolution

There is a common misconception that evolution has a goal or goals. Some also wonder why evolution would select imperfect solutions or not ultimately strive for perfect or perhaps optimal solutions. These issues seem to arise from a projection of our own sentient interactions with our surroundings. We are generally goal driven and often seek increasingly better solutions to problems we encounter. Humans often assume that evolution also has some factor that drives biological systems along a path of continual improvement and that there is some desired endpoint of evolution.

Changes in genotype and phenotype are quite accidental and not the result of a goal directed force. Even in the early stages of evolution, including within the realm of abiogenesis, non-goal directed processes were at work. There are limits to what can be generated by self-organization of inorganic compounds and mutations to genetic codes. However, these limitations are imposed by non-sentient physical factors such as electrical attractions between molecules. It is a structured and somewhat delimited process but not in the sense that humans experience when engaged in systems design and development.

There is arguably a rough structure to evolutionary processes and some constraints placed upon evolutionary pathways by the laws of physics. However, evolution is more of a random walk that only depends on the current state of the organism and the environment. Each succeeding state of the organism is the result of relatively limited changes in genotype. Small changes in a genotype have limited but varied effects on the phenotype. Many of these changes or extant variations in phenotype are neutral in terms of the ability to survive to successfully reproduce. Therefore, there are seeming drawbacks such as a propensity for humans to age and acquire various maladies as they age that eventually result in every person's ultimate demise. Evolutionary processes are completely blind to health issues beyond successful reproductive age such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. By the time that most people are faced with these often fatal health issues they have already reproduced and raised their children to be productive themselves. This means that there are no direct selection pressures to favor those who are less genetically predisposed to such ailments.

Evolution is not even short-sighted, it is actually completely blind to anything but the here and now. Theoretically evolution can be modeled using a semi-Markov process. However, evolution does not engage in the type of probabilistic, forward-looking hypothesis testing found in a semi-Markov process. The next steps in evolution are definitely probabilistic but it must be remembered that the reality of the world is the result of probabilistic mutations, that are the result of happenstance, at varying time spans. As humans it can be tempting when comparing the modeling methods of semi-Markov process to evolution to interject the modeler's cognitive activities into evolution. Whereas the modeler makes assumptions about probable next states evolution merely works with the results of naturally occurring probabilistic processes. The sentient modeling the non-sentient requires a different perspective than we often encounter in our daily lives. The challenge of viewing evolution as a non-sentient process can be exacerbated when one has been taught that life is the result of direction from a deity. The concepts of emergence and self-organization are foreign to many making evolution a difficult concept to grasp and accept.