You can tell whether to attack or retreat. Bingo, you are off and running again, and pretty soon the ocean is full of your descendants rather than those of the other members of your peer group. There is nothing mysterious about evolution, if you grant a sufficiently generous time span when you look for an explanation of what has evolved. If there is time enough for great leaps to occur in small increments, great leaps can happen. Sorry, folks, that's the way it is.
Evolutionary theory explains the past based on the assumption that the process is random.
All the enormous variety of our planetary flora and fauna can be explained on the basis of individual biological entities getting a jump on the competition through small variations that gave them a competitive advantage in the particular environment they inhabited. While natural selection does not in itself confer any powers of prediction, it does not prevent attempts to forecast the future based on other information and understanding. We have determined that unless certain steps are taken, the spotted owl will become extinct. In fact, that determination will perhaps have been facilitated by our understanding of how evolution works. Linguists and others are exploring how we think.