Let us remember that indeterminancy does not mean lack of cause, but merely unpredictability. To this question we can now give a firm and unambiguous answer. Historical processes, however, cannot act purposefully. Natural selection rewards past events, that is the production of successful recombinations of genes, but it does not plan for the future. This is precisely what gives evolution by natural selection its flexibility.
Natural selection is never goal oriented.
It is misleading and quite inadmissible to designate such broadly defined concepts as survival or reproductive success as definite and specified goals. One of Darwin's greatest contributions was to make clear that teleonomic processes involving only a single individual are of an entirely different nature from evolutionary changes. A discussion of legitimately teleological phenomena would be futile unless evolutionary processes are eliminated from consideration. All objects of the physical world are endowed with the capacity to change their state, and these changes follow natural laws. They are end-directed only in a passive, automatic way, regulated by external forces or conditions.