Even Lamarck understood the concept of contingent history. Biological systems often appear well designed. For example, eyes are very precise effective optical systems. Perfect design wipes clean the slate of history. We have a theory to explain how evolution happens - Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.
All organisms are capable of producing more offspring than there are parents.
Given time, this automatically leads to there being more offspring of any organism than can possibly survive. Therefore, some of these offspring must not survive. Those that survive will be those who are best suited to their own local environment. This is natural selection. We also observe that children tend to look like their parents, puppies like their parents, and so forth.