Is Evolution The Best Answer?

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   Wait...don't call the guys with the rubber tuxedos with the extra long sleeves quit yet.

Is "evolution" the best answer for any species, including ours?

The Darwinian Model holds that evolution is a mutational process that favors changes leading to enhanced survivability, but to what end?

Imagine, if you will, that a species, any species, becomes perfectly adapted to it's environment.  What happens then?  The usual answer is inevitable extinction, because becoming highly speacialized within an ecological niche eventually becomes couinter-productive.  There are a few exceptions, of course.  Cockroaches and sharks come immediatley to mind, but so do all those species listed as endangered, which is merely a PC way of saying that they cannot cope with environmental changes.

I used to live near Palmer Lake, just south of Castle Rock, CO.  Along the freeway, bounded on the north side by a quarry, the south side by a former landscaping business, now a ranch, on the west side by four lanes of constant, noisy traffic and on the east side by the tracks of the Union Pacific Railway (trains every 20 minutes 24/7), lies a small park. Not much of park, scrubby, full of things you don't want to hike through, and home to rattlesnakes, coyotes and the occasional bear...BUT...it is sacred ground - it is the home of the Preeble's Jumping Mouse, an endangered species.

I lived up there for about twenty years, hiked through there and geocached there a lot, and never once saw a Preeble.  Talked to the park rangers, and they never saw one either, but it's still sacred ground.  My suspicion is that the Preeble's primary function in life is to feed the rattlesnake population and the raptors that abound, hawks, owls, falcons, etc.  Maybe the coyotes, too.

Now, if I could tak to Darwin, I would ask him what gives with the Preeble?  It can't survive across the highway where there are hundreds of acres of lush grassland and forest, or anywhere else but that scrubby patch of land, maybe ten acres total.  It is that well adapted to that environment, and that cannot be a good thing.  If people were that adapted, we would all be dead the moment we left our immediate neighbrohood.  Same for the animals we depend upon to feed us.

So when does "evolution" stop serving a useful purpose and become instead detrimental to life?  We know that it happens a lot, because we can look up the list of "endangered species" and count them up., but Life doesn't seem to favor highly efficient adaptation.  

Instead, Life seems to favor non-specialization, such as humans and cockroaches.  Live anywhere, eat anything, and able to relocate on a minute's notice.  Is this a flaw in Darwin's Theory, or something else?  Is non-specialization a form of specialization after all?