A recent editorial from NewScientist is entitled Intelligence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The author makes a couple of points that carry implications that he/she might be uncomfortable with.

First, we have this:

One reason might be that by fixating on intellect, we further the idea that we stand apart from nature as the only creatures that orient themselves by deliberate reasoning. Yet each day brings more evidence to undermine this view. For example, modern psychological studies show that when people make good decisions it is often by “gut feeling” rather than conscious calculation. It seems our vaunted intelligence is not all it’s cracked up to be…… As Socrates knew, the really intelligent know the limits of their own ability, an idea we seem to be relearning.

The author is entirely correct in cautioning us not to overestimate our intelligence. But let’s not forget a crucial point – our intelligence lays on the foundation of science, for it is our intelligence that expresses itself via the scientific method. Our intelligence allows us to mentally envision and form a hypothesis. Our intelligence allows us to formulate the hypothesis in a testable form and then carefully design an experiment. Our intelligence then comes into play when analyzing and interpreting the results of an experiment. It is our intelligence that then converts objective data, obtained by design, into the subjective concept of evidence.

Thus, we can legitimately rephrase the last sentence to read, “As Socrates knew, the really intelligent know the limits of science, an idea we seem to be relearning.”

Secondly, the author notes:

Such thinking appears to be moving towards the mainstream, as societies increasingly face complex problems that overwhelm the human mind. Engineers are finding that their task is not so much to find solutions as to design systems that can discover their own.

This is further evidence of the convergence of engineering and biology. If the task of the engineer is to design systems that can discover their own solutions, that, in a nutshell, goes a long way in describing the design and front-loading of evolution. The perspective of evolution as something that was designed is slowly coming into better focus as our own technology advances and converges.