Evolution has no goal, as we usually say. Evolution is a process that adapts a system to the changing environment. The process of the ada...
Evolution has no goal, as we usually say. Evolution is a process that adapts a system to the changing environment. The process of the adaptation is blind, built on random changes in the gene of the species for a race to survive. Even if evolution creates a more and more complex structure, the evolution itself has no direction. Evolution is possible in different ways. Our implementation of the evolution bears the property of creating more and more complex structures. It is not a necessity, it is an aftermath.
Not every complex system in nature is capable of the classical, Darwinian evolution. Most of them just follow the least constraint principle like the chemical reactions, or our society, too. That is a kind of adaptation, but different from the Darwinian evolution.
Darwinian evolution is based on reproduction. Reproductive systems are evolving systems. Reproduction is the necessary and satisfactory criteria for a system to be able to evolve if it has a feedback of suitability. Reproduction is a copy process, and the copy always comes with mistakes, and if the errors are judged by feedback, then the reproduction forms itself into evolution. Evolution is an emergent property of the feedbacked reproductive systems. Life on the Earth is a reproductive process, which affected by the environment, and thereby, evolving system.
An interesting aspect is that the mistakes of the copy process must have a fine and precise ratio. Too many mistakes destroy the system, too few cannot create enough diversity, and cannot find a suitable response to the changing environment. Too many or too few mistakes generate an effect of divergence with positive feedback in the copy process. The copy must be finely tuned and still has a definite chance to divert from the optimum balance. Diversion creates instability in the system. The surprise in our example, in the implementation of the life on the Earth, is that it is so stable. We know the process of copying in detail, but how the fine-tuning of the copy is created and maintained is a mystery, with an adequate but not really satisfying explanation that otherwise, we would not be here.
The mystery even more surprising if we consider, the environmental effects, the speed of the change, and its strength are varying in time on the Earth. Because the sensibility of the reproduction process, and because the whole biosphere itself is not a Darwinian evolving system (it is a least constrain system), the Earth experienced many different extinction periods. The flexibility of the bacterial life-forms maybe is the key to survival.
A finely set copy process, a finely tuned evolution in a reproductive system is the fundament to preserve the system in the changing environment. We may state that the goal of evolution is to preserve life. The Earth biosphere has this sensitive yet finely tuned process to sustain and preserve life.
Maybe life is not so obvious, even in the environment, which bears all the necessary circumstances for life to exist.
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