> Peter Borst I don't know how you can think that there is no goal in evolution.  

This is an informed discussion of ideas, please do not make it personal. The idea that life has a purpose or goal is not supported by science. Survival is the _result_ of evolution, not the goal of it. 

>  Natural selection works solely on selective pressures that are present at the time. Evolution does not, and cannot, anticipate future events. Similarly, evolution has no goal. There is no inevitable progress to some final perfect form. That was a Lamarckian, and indeed also Socratic, illusion. The idea of ‘inclusive fitness’, much beloved by some evolutionary scientists, is probably also to some extent an illusion. 

> It may be worth giving an example. Suppose that HIV were to acquire in some way the infectivity of one of the pathogenic flu viruses and give rise to a lethal epidemic spreading very rapidly. In that case the population that would survive to repopulate the planet would presumably be derived from those people who lack the receptors by which HIV infects cells – CD4 and CCR5. The rare mutants who fail to have these receptors are almost certainly not particularly clever or particularly beautiful, or particularly well adapted in other ways. They survive because they do not have the receptors for a virus that is killing everyone else. That is the way evolution works.

Excerpted from
Genetic and Cultural Evolution: From Fossils to Proteins, and from Behaviour to Ethics
Peter Lachmann, European Review / Volume 18 / Issue 03 / July 2010, pp 297 - 309

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