The Purpose of Evolution

It may be that the primary purpose of evolution is for universal consciousness to rediscover itself.  At the beginning of time all the elements and forces were united, making it unnecessary for life to arise as a means of survival.  When the Big Bang broke everything apart, it was like a painful rip that severed the body that a universal consciousness might have possessed.  Whether it did this on its own or was caused an outside force cannot be known at the present time.  What can be known, or at least theorized by a consensus of scientific individuals, is that life first arose naturally, and that the only way it could sustain itself was by reproducing what it already was.  Each reproduction thenceforth became a new and improved version of the one previous to it, and all living creatures that descended from this primary form of life used its blueprints to build better designs for themselves.  Many plants and animals living today have the most advanced body plans that the planet has ever produced, including us.  The question becomes:  How much more can we evolve, and to what end does evolution follow the course of nature and finish what it sought to create? 

It never ends, you might say.  Evolution may be designing a never-ending sequence of mutations that are outside the parameters of time.  However, on Earth it certainly had a beginning, and if we apply the belief that anything that has a beginning must also have an end, no matter how distant in the future it is, then we must deduce that evolution will come to an end as well.  This doesn't necessarily have to be from the result of a global cataclysm, for evolution may not even be restricted to our planet.  Rather, if it all started on some distant planet farther in the past than we imagined, it could also end sometime in the far future on an even more distant planet that wasn't even the originator.  Or several planets.  Or all the planets known to harbor life... For what higher attainment could life possibly achieve than becoming cosmically conscious about everything that ever was, just as it was in the turbulent singularity from which it used to be aware of itself?  Life is always striving to better itself; to build on revolutionary qualities and refine them into improved ones.  In a dog-eat-dog universe where the fittest reign supreme, the most technologically advanced species, on whatever planet it is they inhabit, may ultimately spread their influence to the farthest reaches of space through means we can't possibly fathom yet. 

Think of how far evolution has advanced on our planet alone.  It has always allowed life to break through barriers and expand to new territories, from microbes infiltrating cells and becoming functional parts of them to the predecessors of whales who returned to the sea after roaming the land for eons.  A species as advanced as an interstellar one would in theory be able to spread its genetic code to every single planet that supports life, making it possible for ever more complex mutations, to the extent that it ultimately reaches universal status.  A universal melting pot would result, much like the one caused by mass immigration to a country like the United States (which incidentally helped make us one of the strongest in the world).  While we are the first species on our planet to globalize using technology, another may have already beaten us to "globalizing" solar systems, galaxies, and even clusters of galaxies.  A species as advanced as this may even transcend the laws of what a species can do.  At this point I leave it up to the imagination to decide what can happen. 

Alas, there is that surprisingly large segment of the biological sciences community that would argue that evolution isn't progressive at all; that it merely gives the appearance of progressing when it's really more directional than anything.  Apparently calling the ability of a species to improve itself in a changing environment “progress” is more of a subjective judgment to them, though I have a hard time seeing how.  It's true that a deteriorating environment would complicate any notion of progress, forcing species to regress in order to survive, but in the grand scheme of things the planet has become less unstable through its long history, granting the vast majority of its evolutionary trends as being progressive instead of regressive.  Matt Ridley, author of Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, goes so far as to say: 

 

"Evolution has no pinnacle and there is no such thing as evolutionary progress.  Natural selection is simply the process by which life-forms change to suit the myriad opportunities afforded by the physical environment and other life-forms." 
 

I don’t accept the idea that evolution, a word which by its own definition means progress, isn't a phenomenon that strives to increase the complexity of life-forms.  How can anyone say this when it gave us the most complex organ we've ever known: the human brain?  Without evolutionary progress, the ones saying this wouldn't even have the power cogitate such a thought.  Bacteria ruled the planet for 3 billion years before larger, more complex life-forms took center stage.  Calling bacteria more successful simply because it's been here longer is like saying the first computer ever invented is more important than the internet.  While we owe a tremendous debt to our microscopic ancestors for paving the way to multi-cellular life, you'd be hard pressed to convince anyone who isn't a scientist that they are evolving at a better rate than we are.  Leave it to the scientists to overthink something so basic.