It would have a purpose in my proposed first sense - and in my proposed second sense - if we are talking about the evolutionary process after the evolution of forward-looking brains.

Evolution (or the biosphere) was what was being argued about in the video. The claim was that it didn't behave in a goal directed manner - because of its internal conflicts. The idea that lack of harmony could mess up goal-directedness seems OK to me.

One issue of whether the biosphere has enough harmony for a goal-directed model to be useful. If it has a single global brain, and can do things like pool resources to knock out incoming meteorites, it seems obvious that a goal-directed model is actually useful in predicting the behaviour of the overall system.