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RE: Thoughts about Natural Selection.
I'm currently reading a book titled "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley. It expands of many of the things you mention here. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. If you are interested in evolution, you will really be impressed.
Ann important concept I read somewhere in the book is that we often make the mistake of assuming that we evolve in order to survive. But it's really the other way around. Survival is not a target by itself. It's just that those who better adapt happen to survive.
I haven't heard of that book, thanks!
The one I have been wanting to get for myself is Richard Dawkins famous book called "The Greatest Show on Earth".
That's another way of seeing it. But it certainly looks like survival is the end goal, since only the successful mutations are the ones that remain. So if we don't evolve to survive, why do we evolve?
I will copy an excerpt from the book to explain this concept :)
"...Only gradually did it dawn on modern biologists that the Weismann logic was profoundly flawed. It seems to treat evolution as some kind of imperative, as if evolving was what species exist to do – as if evolving were a goal imposed on existence.
This is of course nonsense. Evolution is something that happens to organisms. It is a directionless process that sometimes makes an animal’s descendants more complicated, sometimes simpler, and sometimes changes them not at all. We are so steeped in notions of progress and self-improvement that we find it strangely hard to accept this. But nobody has told the coelacanth, a fish that lives off Madagascar and looks exactly like its ancestors of 300 million years ago, that it has broken some law by not evolving. The notion that evolution simply cannot go fast enough, and its corollary that a coelacanth is a failure because it did not become a human being, is easily refuted. As Darwin noticed, mankind has intervened dramatically to speed up evolution, producing hundreds of breeds of dogs, from chihuahuas to St Bernards in an evolutionary eyeblink. That alone is evidence that evolution was not going as fast as it could. Indeed, the coelacanth, far from being a flop, is rather a success. It has stayed the same – a design that persists without innovation, like a Volkswagen Beetle. Evolving is not a goal but a means to solving a problem."
Whether a species evolves or not, the ones that are best adapted to the environment will survive while others will perish. It's not a goal but survivorship bias. If you had two animals and one of them adapted to new situations while the other one did not, one would die (and not reproduce) and the other one would stay alive and reproduce. So only the second animal's descendants would remain, evolved.