The Evolution of Evolution

I was reading an article by Louis Menand, one of my professors, in the New Yorker from a few years ago, where he makes the comment

In 1859, Charles Darwin announced his conclusion that all life forms are the result of processes that are natural, chance-generated, and blind. There is, he thought, no "meaning" to evolutionary development. Evolution is just a by-product of the fact that organisms have to compete with one another in order to survive. If there were no struggle, if some organisms didn't have to die so that others could live, there would be no development. That is all evolution amounts to. This recognition seems to have made Darwin literally sick. But, ever since "On the Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man" (1871), people have used Darwin's theory to explain why one or another way of managing human affairs is "natural." The notion is that a particular arrangement must have been "selected for"—as though the struggles among individuals and groups and ideas were nature's way of making sure that we end up with the best.

 I think this is an interesting, important point. People these days discuss evolution as though the modern human is the peak of evolution. Evolutionary theory says NOT that we are the pinnacle of evolution, but rather that we are the result of random events. Maybe at one point it was advantageous for us to have eyelids or chest hair or certain instinctive psychological tendencies, but that may have been merely because of some bizarre situation humanity found itself in that does not apply anymore.We don't know what all of those situations were, so the exercise of theorizing why these things came about is futile and unprovable.

*Edit. An excellent article in the WSJ talks about this kind of thing