Evolution or simple adaptation?

On my way to Flakis today, red-orange clouds of sunset.

I wondered why we insist on calling Evolution by that name. That word implies development. Is it because we see ourselves as the pinnacle of the process, and our brains can conceive of higher reaches we might still get to? Darwin, revolutionary as he was in his thought, couldn't totally escape his religious upbringing, victorian expansionism, british colonialist ego, etc.. But names can be very misleading, and maybe we should reconsider.

After all, it can be argued that there's only evidence for Adaptation, not Evolution. Organisms change to adapt to new challenges, that's all, but there's no pre-ordained plan that means these adaptations make life "better".

Granted: looking at the history of life, it does seem living beings have become progressively more complex. From unicellular isolated to colonies, to photosynthesis, to single pluricellular organisms, to exoskeletons and endoskeletons, and so on and so forth.

But complexity can be viewed in many different ways. Cancer, for instance, is a complex degenerative disorder, the disorderly multiplication of life.

This idea is not new. I read once an SF story written in the first decades of last century. I suuppose by then astronomers had realized the universe was expanding but the Big Bang theory was either not yet developed or not widely accepted. The author proposed --playfully, i suppose-- that the universe was seen as running away from us because that's what it was in fact doing: escaping from the plague of Earth and its life.

What this story assumes is that life will eventually want to extend itself to other planets, and in fact, we are looking in that direction. The Huygens probe that landed the other day on Titan is our latest achievement in that respect. Poor Titan, bound to our sun by gravity and thus unable to flee.

If life spreads in this fashion (and by the way it's occupied all the nooks and crannies of this planet, it would seem it can indeed adapt to cope with almost anything), then maybe it can be seen as a tool developer.

Our big brain is the tool we credit the most for our own ability to spread and adapt. Thanks to it, of all known lifeforms, we're the one that is capable of inserting itself into the most heterogeneous set of environments. That we can survive in all of them is yet to be proven. If our civilization collapses, the whole species might go with it. Maybe that would mean that our brains were imperfect, a failed experiments. As an owner of a big brain and a lover of our kind of consciousness, i am partial to big brains and hope nature would develop other, better adapted ones. Or perhaps we will, and they will be our successors. After all, as i said before, we can see our imperfections sometimes, and strive to conquer them. Whether our successors were biological or machine, i wouldn't care, as long as they respected each other and nature more. If that's the case, then they will be ourselves, an extension of ourselves.

Personally, though in my darkest moments what i said above is the best i dare to hope for, i still believe we can survive with our present brains as they are. If only we used them to check ourselves, our feelings and their roots. If we remembered that we're part of nature, too. There's nothing unnatural. That's a myth.