Natural selection requires variation to select over.

If you have natural selection over the swarm, then the only thing that doesn't work is if no one does anything.

As long as lots of people do something, there's variation to select over.

This is why the Saruman archetype is useful in ecosystems.

Any individual Saruman is unlikely to make the successful thing.

But a Saruman will do something coherent that stands out from the background noise.

Something that cuts through the nebulosity to cohere as a distinct thing.

And some of those somethings will turn out to be useful and survive.