Evolution apparently has an associated optimisation target. See my:

http://originoflife.net/direction/

http://originoflife.net/gods_utility_function/

Others have written on this as well - e.g. Robert Wright, Richard Dawkins, John Stewart,

Evolution is rather short-sighted - and only has the lookahead capabilities that organisms have (though these appear to be improving with time). So: whether the target can be described as being a "goal" is debatable.

However, we weren't talking about evolution, we were talking about superintelligences. Those are likely to be highly goal-directed.