What's the context? The GP probably meant that intelligence is an emergent property not directly coded in DNA.
Natural selection is not pure chance. At least seeing it that way doesn't yield anything except maybe lowered expectations. You want some expectations.
Hiding you theory behind Nature is not any less religious. Nature is pretty much synonym with living things, existence in general, and actually stems from to be born. Nature as the reason for things being born is thus kind of true by definition. The rational behind the generational evolution is the exact opposite of pure chance, though. Chance is only applicable if there are two possible outcomes. In hindsight, only one outcome was possible, so there are no chances, just facts.
The argument I am getting at is, self similarity seems to be such a common property, that it's maybe inevitable somewhere in a complex system. From there to self awareness and critical thinking is a long way to go, but what you call millions of years is a blink of an eye on a cosmological scale.
The idea of complexity includes enough variety to appear random to us, so we might agree that it's just a difficult to express concept and this is only semantic quibbling.
Natural selection is not pure chance. At least seeing it that way doesn't yield anything except maybe lowered expectations. You want some expectations.
Hiding you theory behind Nature is not any less religious. Nature is pretty much synonym with living things, existence in general, and actually stems from to be born. Nature as the reason for things being born is thus kind of true by definition. The rational behind the generational evolution is the exact opposite of pure chance, though. Chance is only applicable if there are two possible outcomes. In hindsight, only one outcome was possible, so there are no chances, just facts.
The argument I am getting at is, self similarity seems to be such a common property, that it's maybe inevitable somewhere in a complex system. From there to self awareness and critical thinking is a long way to go, but what you call millions of years is a blink of an eye on a cosmological scale.
The idea of complexity includes enough variety to appear random to us, so we might agree that it's just a difficult to express concept and this is only semantic quibbling.