Evolution Is a Ladder of Progress Toward Higher, Better Beings

Evolution has no ladder, no goal, and no top. It is the result of natural selection acting on random variation: whatever traits help an organism survive and reproduce in its particular environment get passed on, and that is the entire mechanism. There is no built-in drive toward complexity or toward us. Bacteria, which are 'simple', are among the most successful and abundant life forms on Earth and are exquisitely adapted; a tapeworm that lost organs it no longer needed evolved to be simpler, and that was a fit solution, not a failure. Humans are not the pinnacle or the purpose; we are one twig on an enormous branching bush, no more 'evolved' than any other living species, all of which have been evolving for exactly the same amount of time. The 'march of progress' picture is so misleading that even its illustrator regretted it. Evolution is not climbing toward anything. It is just endlessly fitting life to wherever it happens to be.