Evolution is the change in the inherited characteristics of biological populations over successive generations.
Note that there is no stated goal, nor is there any implication that the process is positive or negative. Now, I'm not trying to sell Wikipedia as the ultimate source of definitions, but this one is essentially the same as you will find from any other noted source.
Evolution must be good, right? I mean, we're the result of evolution, and we're pretty awesome, right? Right? Not really. Evolution just means change. We're the result of evolution through a long history of natural selection. In the minds of ordinary people, evolution equals progress. We think that it means that because social scientists tell us it does. The truth is, there is no evidence that the entire process is in any way benevolent toward us. There is no evidence that we are evolving toward something better; only that we are evolving toward something different.
Most evolution through natural selection favors those new characteristics that are the most successful given the enclosing environment. Human beings wreak havoc on natural selection because we have evolved the ability to change our environment. We put clothes on. We grow food. We live in houses. We have central heat and air conditioning. It was inevitable, if you think about it. Natural selection among species passive to their environments resulted in a lot of dead ends. Dodo birds and dinosaurs. It makes sense that the ability to change the environment to be less hostile would be more a more successful characteristic.
Except now, we're busy creating an environment that is increasingly more hostile toward us. Technology and socialism, both the economic system as well as the societal trait, are making us stupid and lazy. We're making our world more dangerous, and we're not evolving in a direction that allows us to adapt to it. In the past, our evolution took many tens of thousands of years to make small changes. I offer that we have evolved many noticeable changes just over the last century or so. We're fat. We're soft and weak. We eat poison and survive for a while. We breath poison and survive for a while. But, we're not evolving fast enough to keep up with how fast we are changing the environment. At the current rate of progress, we'll extinct ourselves in a century or so.
So what happened? How is it that the pinnacle of evolutionary natural selection has gone so wrong? The answer is entropy. Entropy is the process by which everything tends toward its lowest potential energy. Thermodynamic equilibrium. The end state of maximum entropy is a universe of inert atomic dust evenly dispersed across the void. If there is a ghost in the evolutionary machine, its goal is maximum entropy. The whole process is blindly oblivious to our existence. In actual fact, we aren't the pinnacle of natural selection because our potential energy is too high. We're one of those evolutionary side trips. We'll keep evolving toward maximum entropy.
If maximum entropy is the end state, how did we get as far as we did? We've actually been pretty successful. Our control over our environment let us avoid entropy for a long time. However, evolution into entropy is a difference engine, and we have made a pretty wide variance. The differences are catching up with us quickly.
If there is a pinnacle of natural selection here on planet Earth, it is likely the cockroach, or maybe the shark. Cockroaches are born, they eat, they breed, they die. They are the most entropic life form on the planet. There is no need for them to evolve toward anything until the entropy of the rest of the universe catches up with them.
Depressing? Not really. It's inevitability, and there is no reason to be depressed about the inevitable. Get on with what you were doing and don't worry about it. Seek maximum psychological entropy. Just evolve.
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