Wicked King says in
Message 21:
As long as you have a system which imperfectly replicates with heritable traits you should see some form of natural selection working to favour those traits which improve replication frequency.
Ray says in
Message 25:
How does NS know to improve if it is not intelligent ?
Hopefully Wounded King won't mind an amateur butting in... and when I get it wrong he'll correct me
NS
doesn't know and it doesn't need to know. All that needs to happen is the results of replication (the children if you want to think of it in anthropomorphic terms) survive and replicate better than their peers.
In an evolutionary sense "improve" does not mean bigger, stronger, quicker or anything like that. In the post you replied to WK was talking to Limbo about the first organism, but it doesn't matter if it is the very first thing we would regard as alive, a dinosaur or a human today - the concept is still the same.
In evolutionary terms the
definition of "improved" or "fitter" is that your offspring do better than your peers offspring because of some trait they inherited.
In simple terms the outcome of Natural Selection is your children live long enough to have more babies than their peers.
Oops! Wrong Planet