Can Natural Selection Produce Intelligent Design?

What it comes down to, IMO, is that you probably don't want an explanation.I bet that, if for example the field of artificial life / artificial intelligence comes up with a way to make these "unique" human capacities appear out of nowhere, you will never accept that it went like that in nature, too. You will insist that it is just a "simulation", a way to "mimic" natural processes, but in no way an accurate description of the "real" process.Of course, any results in these fields would also come very gradually. So I also already predict that you will go through a process of continuously moving the goalposts further back. Seriously: can you imagine ANY type of discovery that you would accept as the answer to your questions?

Dito that... But somehow I don't expect people like Imrenault to EVER accept this as a possibble explanation of how it might have happened in Evolution...

Define "ordinary" ;-)Of course, there is absolute no doubt that we are quite unique if you compare us to other products of evolution.However, we always have to add "thus far" and "as far as we know". Or in other words: there are many more eons available in which evolution could (seperately) evolve something of the same level again. And there is an (almost?) infinitely big universe out there that we haven't checked out, and where evolution has undoubtedly also been at work.So from that point of view, it is not so sure that "not ordinary" fits the case.In fact, there are thinkers who will argue that "something of the level of hs" is more or less an inevitable outcome (or intermediate to something better, if you want)of evolution.So personally, I don't feel like agreeing. It's simply inconclusive for the moment.

Maybe because it doesn't "come about by chance"?Remember that although mutation is chance, selection is not.Mutation combined with selection produces solutions for certain problems. And convergent evolution illustrates that evolution is able to find certain "best practices" over and over again, independant from each other.Does, one could argue that development of abilities of intelligence is possibly one of those "best practices" which are bound to be discovered by evolution over time.Of course, in case of "intelligence" this is more speculative at this moment than for, for example, the eye or (different types of) wings, because we only have one example. But this could be due to higher complexity that is required before the step becomes an option.

Agreed.But it looks like there is some intelligence "threshold" that has to be passed before the intelligence is able to super-amplify. And it seems like advanced language is what does the trick? Well, I don't pretend to know for sure that human-level intelligence is "inevitable" or "likely". It's just one of the possibilities, that it is somekind of "forced move" once the necessary brain-complexity is in place.At that point, it might simply be a matter of chance. Like: does some organ evolve that happens to 'transform' into a flexible means of communication?