“survives” is also an “in order to”
I thought philosophical subtlety was your specialty.
The difference lies in whether it is possible to know the future in detail, and make advantageous changes in advance.
Sometimes it is. You can lead a moving target with a shotgun, so the swing of the gun would be and example of change "in order to" hit a target.
But ecosystems are not a smoothly moving target. Nor is climate. These factors are complex and chaotic. There is no strategy that can always successfully anticipate need. The strategy that living things have devised is to make small changes in many offspring, anticipating that most will die before reproducing.
This is, in fact, what happens. Even in humans. Most sperm are defective, and the majority of fertilized zygotes are spontaneously aborted. There are species in which the percentage of individuals born alive, but which die before reproducing, is close to one hundred percent. (The word "anticipating" is, of course, a figure of speech. It makes no difference whether the change is directed or whether it is stochastic. The outcome is not affected by the cause of the change.)