your conclusion seemed to be that the products of instrumental reasoning (conducting science, galactic colonization, building factories, etc) and evolutionary competition would be enough to capture most of the potential value of the future. That would make sense in light of your talk about evolution and convergence.

I didn't mean to say anything about "instrumental reasoning".

I do in fact think that universal instrumental values may well be enough to preserve some humans for the sake of the historical record, but that is a different position on a different topic - from my perspective.

My comment was about evolution. Evolution has produced the value in the present and will produce the value in the future. We are part of the process - and not some kind of alternative to it.

Competition represents the evolutionary process known as natural selection. However there's more to evolution than natural selection - there's also symbiosis and mutation. Mutations will be more interesting in the future than they have been in the past - what with the involvement of intelligent design, interpolation, extrapolation, etc.