Mother Nature had to solve that problem a long time ago. The only
reason it's not so obvious it's because our notion of evolution was
created (or rather I should say distorted) by a fascist minded people.
At the core of all life lies DNA replication, which is just copying
itself as best as possible (if it works, there's no need to change
it!). That is stagnation, and is very much needed. But this in the
long run may create problems, because environment is slowly changing,
and some innovation is needed to avoid extinction. The only way the
nature has to achieve it is the gene exchange. Now the crucial
question is, how and why it works? Fascists claim that it creates
"better" organisms, with a purpose and right to replace the old
"worse" ones (if you see an analogy with some init system here, it's
because there's one!). But it's not true, a child of two geniuses
doesn't even have to be smart, we still have one cell bacteria,
mammals didn't kill the reptiles, and so on. It can't be true, because
Nature can't know the future, so there's no way to tell what is / will
be better and what worse. For this reason the only reasonable strategy
is to create as much diversity as possible, so even if some
unpredictable catastrophe / disease happens, not all organisms will be
affected by it. Innovation is needed, but it can't destroy the
diversity, and when it does, it can't and won't last long. In terms of
(short) success, cancer cells are the best, they seem to be immortal,
have the ability to dominate and destroy all other cells in the
organism. But the price of this is high, they finally kill themselves
by killing the organism in which they grow. Once again it's an obvious
analogy, and hopefully that cancer won't kill linux. Yes, innovation
is needed, but not at all price, since nothing can be the best
solution, and the more diversity the better, for everyone.