I would like to say a few words on Paulo’s comment, there is one phrase I disagree with and that I would like to discuss:
You can only fight the environment with the tools the genome has given you.
In a very indirect way, yes, but well… no. I don’t want to take this to those interesting discussions on nature versus nurture: I think it would be easy to make the case for social interactions (both for us and other species), drugs (which might suppress some genome changes - think cancer), etc tweaking our genome… A stronger case could be put forward by reminding that we will be able to change our genome in even more radical ways than getting rid of cancer cells. In the future we will be able to create genomes (or am I seeing too much sci-fi?). Of course it could be counter-argued that at the end this is the product of our genome (in the sense that this is all products of our “genomic-based” intelligence) to start with, but I think that would be an argument of a more rhetorical than practical form.
This reminds me of that idea (and getting to the point that concerns me the most) that “You can only do what physics allows you to do” (the comparison is not perfect as the “physics case” is easier to defend). Yes, you can only do what is physically possible, but does that matter in practice? When you want to describe, say genetic based problems, you could resort only to reductionist physics arguments, but that would make the whole description and study of genetics’ problems cumbersome and very very verbose. To put it a CS way of expressing things: The level of abstraction is not enough. The same goes (in fact the whole idea that we can only use the tools that the genome gave us is more debatable, while the idea that we are all physics is much less so) to the “genome”. Yes, we might be all genome definable and maybe we cannot escape that but I think it would be a fallacy to try to see all things from the “eye of the genome”.
Paulo might complain that I am misinterpreting his words (I doubt we wants to see the world only through the “eye of the genome”), for that I apologize. But I was feeling the need to complain against “reductionist” approaches and so I used him as a scapegoat 
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2 Comments to "Cheap philosophy"
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No problem on using me as a scapegoat, as we say in Brazil “I have put my face to be slapped”.
You are no misinterpreting my words, but you are only considering my phrase from an anthropocentric view. Yes we can modify genomes, even will be able to create new ones. This ability can be reduced to the tools our own genome has given us, because in the end the phenotype is a reflection of your genotype (plus the environment).
But and all those species that only have access to the molecular biology lab in a Petri dish? They have a “limited” toolset to “fight” the environment and this is solely based on their genome.
Any assertion that evolution has some universal direction is typically hard to show. We have a very biased view since we focus on multicellular organism that are a very small fraction of life. Even about the evolution of multicellular there is considerable discussion to what degree natural selection (directionality) has contributed to the appearance of the cellular complexity associated with these lifeforms. The strongest voice against the role of adaption is Lynch.
On the other hand we do see that even at the cellular level there are many systems that appear to be very adaptable. An example is the control of cytoskeleton. Microtubule growth and destabilization is a general process that is decoupled from any particular cell shape program. In this way the cells can use the same cytoskeleton organization features to shape the cell to do many different things. Kirchner and Gerhart call these “exploratory processes”. Systems that appear to be very adaptable and therefore can be used in many different situations with no changes in the underlying mechanism but just by directing them in different ways. Their book “The Plausibility of Life” has a many discussions about this. This also sounds like a programed function that can be called from anywhere in the program and in this way can be used in a broader sense as part of many different processes. John Doyle as written a lot about this analogy mentioning many time the concept of protocols in biological systems (ex Rules of engagement).
I think this is a very interesting and important discussion but we are far from settling on an answer.