Evolution is not progress. Despite what every crackpot who tries to play the part of a mad scientist says. Populations simply adapt to their current surroundings. They do not necessarily become better in any absolute sense over any period of time. The developed traits that work really well at one time may or may not work at a later date. Paquin and Adams demonstrated this through intensive experimentation. They placed a colony of yeast into a culture and maintained it for many successive generations. Occasionally, a mutation would pop out of the woodwork that would allow its bearer to reproduce better than its compatriots. These mutant strains would push out the formerly dominant strains and take over. I can only imagine that if those lucky yeast strains could speak they would be screaming, "I'm the king of the test tube!" Samples of the most successful strains from the culture were taken at a various times. In later competition experiments, each strain would out compete the immediately previously dominant type in a culture. However, some earlier isolates could out compete strains that arose late in the experiment. Competitive ability of a strain was always better than its previous type, but competitiveness in a general sense was not increasing. Any organism's success depends on the behavior of its comrades in arms (the other yeast samples). For most traits or behaviors there is likely no optimal design or strategy, only contingent ones. Evolution can be like a game of rock, paper, scissors, dynamite.
Organisms are not passive targets of their environment. They are not content to sit back as the world around them evolves. They move things around and adapt themselves to whatever conditions arise. Sometimes the creature wins and sometimes Fate wins. Each and every species will die out eventually. Until then, organisms will change what is around them. At the least, organisms remove nutrients from and add waste to their surroundings. Often, waste products from one organism will benefit at least one other species. Wild Buffalo dung in Asia and Africa are food and homes for the Dung Bettle. The plants that grow from the dung that the bettles do not use gives off oxygen as their waste. That is one thing that we can not live without no matter how hard we try. Species do not simply change to fit their environment; they modify their environment to suit them as well. Beavers build dams to create a pond suitable to sustain them and raise young. The environment changes and the resulting pond soon spills over to flood the surrounding area. The wildlife in the forests will migrate and the beavers will thrive. Predatory animals that like to snack on beaver as much as most of us like chips, move in. They eat the beaver until the balance shifts and either nature or a higher predator, namely humans in this imaginary senario, move in and destroy the beaver and the thus destroy the predator. The ponds are abandoned, trees grow from the slim, the forest is reborn, the evicted animals move back in and the cycle continues.