That's the thing with evolution, it's all about the ability to adapt.
Caveat being that you never know what adaptation you'll need until the shock arrives, and at that point it's too late. At that point, you either have the ability to adapt, or you don't. Nature doesn't care if you're the smartest, the strongest, the healthiest, the most whatever. Doesn't matter to her. Can you adapt to this different environment or not? That's all that matters.
Your average physically fit female would have been dead after less than 15 minutes in the water after Titanic went down. Lower body fat percentage, etc etc etc. At the same time, the portly, out of shape, and perpetually drunk chief baker lived in the water for over 8 hours. Now that's not an example of evolution or anything, but it does illustrate the value of adaptability when shock radical change occurs. The chief baker's body was able to adapt to a radical change in environment, everyone else' was not.
https://www.nature.com/news/2004/040322/full/news040322-9.ht...
Apparently human big brains evolved after a mutation that left human jaw much weaker than their ancestors.
Who can say if we prune unwanted traits, we aren't also pruning some desired traits as well.
My point is that we are not knowledgeable and qualified to play God yet. We will definitely do it and we will invariably fuck it up. That does not mean we should actually attempt to do it.
My point is that evolution is not qualified to play god, unless by “god” you mean Azathoth.
Evolution is not qualified is the traditional sense, because its goal is not to play god. It's qualified in the sense that this is a side effect of evolution.
Once you throw away the safety of this "validation" and it takes a long time to actually understand what the effects are you will see in some cases the disastrous results of what you're doing
This is the explanation behind genetic disorders being more common in certain populations. Sickle Cell Anemia (2 copies of defective gene) is terrible, but Sickle Cell Trait (1 copy) protects against Malaria. Having one copy is advantageous in areas where Malaria is endemic.
But I wouldn't go so far as to say evolution isn't even trying. Bacteria apparently produce more mutations than normal in hostile environments, apparently a form of gambling on anything being better than what we are d meoing currently.