True. Evolution is full of dead ends. Not everything evolves for the "better". At the end, survival is what shows if evolution adapted to the current situation.
However, some of the points iconoclastic brings up, are the very reasons why I strongly believe in social evolution as well. In the animal kingdom, life is not respected the same way humans do. Survival of the fittest does not care about moral values in the animal kingdom. We humans are driven to save and conserve every life and we consider this idea to be of a higher order of thinking (I am not here to debate wether this is correct or not, is just a fact and I agree with preserving life). At the same time, we pretty much live in the same environment as the animals and therefore under some of the same rules. We have introduced some rules of our own, namely religion, finance, technology, etc. Some of the by products of the above, like global warming, deforestation, etc, have taken its toll on the planet much much faster than what is known to be common in evolutionary changes. In other words, we have introduced a ripple in the evolutionary order, bigger than any other drastic weather change on record. Social evolution has its effects on this as many of the above. Could this be one of the dead ends? May be, but I can not help and see how our social and moral values have contributed to the overall decisions made. This wasn't all driven by instinct. True, there is a degree of it, we are programmed to survive and as such, we will consume. But even in the animal kingdom some animals think twice about things. Some tarantulas protect a tiny race of frogs from predators because this frogs eat insects that would otherwise eat the tarantula's eggs. If that was the case for humans, in some cases we would have eaten the frog before we realized what kind of benefit it brought to us.