I don't know if dolphins define their purpose or progress. More likely, we look at them in a state of equilibrium now, and think "that looks nice", but at vario

I don't know if dolphins define their purpose or progress. More likely, we look at them in a state of equilibrium now, and think "that looks nice", but at various points over the past hundreds of millions of years, virtually every species experienced drastic shifts within a brief few millenia which also nearly wiped them out. This is not always inter-species conflict. Female dolphins have a spiral-shaped vagina for reasons you can imagine may have resembled an arms race among dolphins. We are clearly in the middle of something like that, which means we're in a poor position to make predictions. We went from something like equilibrium, more or less the same from 1M years ago to 5,000 years ago, to a radically different state. It may very well not last another 5,000 years. I think maybe we need to see these arms races as short ramps, periods of chaos, which lead either to long plateaus or very quick collapses. >> Universe did not favor complexity. Universe destroys order and moves towards more entropy. Life is something that goes against this. Life probably was required to trap Sun's energy so that Earth can cool itself. I think if the Universe were not programmed to generate complexity, there would only be one or two elements. I think the tendency toward entropy is a necessary condition to force complexity and life to evolve. The Universe is slowly trading global energy everywhere for local complexity somewhere. This is how energy is turned into information. If energy at the beginning of the Universe is nearly infinite, then clearly it is cheaper and less valuable to whoever is reading the output than the valuable limited information it can produce (with tons of wasted energy). I believe this because I believe that converting energy to information is not a side-effect of the Universe, but its ultimate purpose. So yeah, forests are beautiful. Beehives are beautiful. Colonies of fungus are beautiful. Kansas City from the air at night is... well, we shouldn't underrate ourselves.