You can view both intelligence and natural selection as special cases of optimization: processes that hit, in a large search space, very small targets defined by implicit preferences. Natural selection prefers more efficient replicators. Human intelligences have more complex preferences. Neither evolution nor humans have consistent utility functions, so viewing them as “optimization processes” is understood to be an approximation. You’re trying to get at the sort of work being done, not claim that humans or evolution do this work perfectly.
