Does evolution have a goal?
No. Natural selection is three things running together, and none of them aims at anything. Something copies itself imperfectly, the imperfection passes to the copies, and some versions end up with more copies than others. Nobody decides. In Richard Lenski's laboratory, daily since 1988, a pipette has moved one hundredth of each of twelve flasks of E. coli into a fresh flask. It cannot tell one cell from another, yet the populations change in a consistent direction, and mean fitness, measured against thawed ancestors, climbed through fifty thousand generations. Being fitter today predicts nothing about the day after, because the flask a lineage competes in is the flask it is changing. OPH adds one condition at the scale of the whole universe. A universe that reads itself into existence needs intelligence, so its history has to contain an evolution that reaches minds. That is a requirement on the whole, and no single step of selection aims at it.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 39: Why Is a Bacterium Freer Than an Atom?watch a universe make its own particles