While this is certainly an interesting idea, it subscribes to certain assumptions that adherents of so-called progress ideology maintain; that there is a sense of progress towards some goal or even goaless momentum (as with increasing levels of technology), and that this is an inherently good thing. Many people notably anarcho-primitivists and one Teddy "The Unabomber" Kaczynski object to this deeply culturally-ingrained concept, noting that conception of "progress" as an abstract idea is a fairly recent development (ie within last 500 years.)
Granted, the first impulse of anyone in my culture (ie American) is that this is crazy; after all, progress gives us cars and medicine and all sorts of other neat stuff. Well, antelopes could give a shit about medicine, and the squoooshed possum I saw this morning more'n likely has the possum equivalent of some seriously negative emotions towards cars (not even mentioning the fact that technically, humanity is an extinction event in geological time due to the number of species we've gotten rid of); perhaps we aren't asking the right set of entities about the benefits of progress.
Even more interesting is the concept of whether these advances (well, changes at least) have actually improved man's condition within the world, and thus the question regarding whether this sort of directed evolution would actually improve mankind's ability to extract meaning and such from their own lives. I'd argue that they do in certain ways, notably because it means that I get to know all sorts of physics and, well, that's how I get my rocks off. However, the fact that people would argue the other way indicate that it isn't a closed case.