For one individual, maybe your analogy might be closer to what evolution tries, but I suspect in a large group of individual in a species over a long period, a more eloquent description could be emerged.
No, it's pretty much "hold my beer, I got this" billions of times until something works.
Evolution isn't organized or eloquent. It's messy and random and non-optimized. Evolution results in many individuals who are not fit, any many evolved solutions are quite plainly bad.
Any elegance or beauty in evolution is a construct humans apply to an incredibly abstract and obtuse concept because that's just what we do to things that are difficult to grok.
Evolution is simply random mutations from various mechanisms, but the only guiding force is that of survival. Some random changes make some individuals more fit to survive, which makes the species more fit in time. There really isn't anything more to it. It's all just random chance averaged over a very, very long time.
A very large number of random decisions needn't always yet surprisingly often results in high-level emergent elegant/predictable phenomena... that's like, the entire point of statistics.
It's only a matter of time before the conglomeration of ancient software slowly having complexity bolted on becomes self-aware and helps plot the overthrow of the lunar government
