Well, I've also been thinking a bit more about where we are heading, and was struck by something that could give direction to the speculations.
In principle, evolution isn't supposed to work towards an end goal, and isn't supposed to produce "superior" organisms. And the reason for this is that natural selection usually only produces a very "local" (in time and place) superiority. Thus, the continued movement in the direction of "progress" only lasts as long as the circumstances remain fairly stable. When they change, it is possible that a lot of the "designwork" that had been done, suddenly becomes useless, and that advantages become disadvantages.
In that regard, I also refer to an analogy I once read: evolution is like holding an elimination tournament with numerous "rounds", and in each round you get to compete in a
different challenge. Say, chess, checkers, tennis, bowling, high-jump, sharp shooting, a memory-game... The order of the challenges is also completely random. If you suppose a number of competitors, each with different talents (each of them can be ranked in each of the disciplines, and each of them is The Best in one of them), this kind of tournament will never have something you would call "THE superior competitor" as end-winner, not even one that is the best in one of the individual disciplines.
Anyways, the reason why this is, is that circumstances change, and natural selection makes organisms conform to the changes. Since the changes are more-or-less random, the organism doesn't travel through design-space in a straight line towards a continuously more perfect solution for a particular challenge, but it wobbles in all directions. On top of that, certain historical "design-choices" could prove to be so difficult to "rewind", that they remain a disadvantage for a long time.
The idea that I got is that humans might actually be the first organisms to get around this hurdle. And the reason is that we change the environment around us, to fit US, instead of passively undergoing the changes and evolving along them. So what we are effectively doing is stabilizing the environment, or in other words we are actively "straightening out" our path through design space; we are eliminating the "wobbling" that is typical for evolution.
Wouldn't all this mean that, provided we maintain ourselves long enough, we might be the first species to defeat the 'random' aspect of evolution?
™ Version 4.2