Avoiding silly theological tropes, evolution is often mistakenly referred to as a designer when it's just an emergent property of competing, replicating agents. People don't normally bother with precision though, so we are where we are.
[1] “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”
But evolution doesn't eliminate entities. Low fitness entities are eliminated by hunger, or predators, or lower reproductive rates.
The marble on the other hand is eliminated by Michelangelo.
There's a linguistic confusion where because evolution is a noun, we think we can treat it as a subject. But in the person/place/thing/idea delineation, it is an idea.
Not only does it not design, not only does it not eliminate: "it" doesn't do anything!
Entities could be alleles, genes, or gene products
Not at all. Everything can come from variation (mutation, cross over) + elimination of the worst. It's just that 'worst' is not a global minimum. Are we as humans superior to animals in strength, agility, speed, etc? Not at all. But some distant ancestor had some bigger brain, and that gave it all the edge it needed compared to weak and dumber siblings that were eaten, while our ancestor hid on a tree.
When some animal mutated to be able to eat meat in addition to plants, it had some advantage and was less likely to be eliminated when food got scarce. That's all you need to eventually arrive at something tiger-like.
That said, some animals seem to have reached a local maximum: sharks haven't changed in millions of years, cockroaches seem pretty successful, too.
But there's nothing 'creative' about it.