I saw a dichotomy between them, the blindness of natural selection and the lookahead of intelligent foresight, [...] yet it was natural selection that created human intelligence, so that our brains, though not our thoughts, are entirely made according to the signature of natural selection.
Humans are the product of choices by intelligent agents. It would indeed be a shattering insight to discover that “blind” forces forged humanity—but that’s not how it happened, the agents responsible posessed both vision and foresight—and were not “blind” in any reasonable sense of the word. See: http://alife.co.uk/essays/evolution_sees/
it drives me up the wall when people lump together natural selection and intelligence-driven processes as “evolutionary”
That’s perfectly correct, according to the definition of evolution. Evolution is about variation and selection in populations of entities. There is no specification that variation should be random—or that selection should be unthinking. Evolution thus includes intelligent design among its fundamental mechanisms, by its very definition. For example, genetic engineering is a type of evolution. Check any evolution textbook for the definition of evolution.
Humans are the product of choices by intelligent agents. It would indeed be a shattering insight to discover that “blind” forces forged humanity—but that’s not how it happened, the agents responsible posessed both vision and foresight—and were not “blind” in any reasonable sense of the word. See: http://alife.co.uk/essays/evolution_sees/
That’s perfectly correct, according to the definition of evolution. Evolution is about variation and selection in populations of entities. There is no specification that variation should be random—or that selection should be unthinking. Evolution thus includes intelligent design among its fundamental mechanisms, by its very definition. For example, genetic engineering is a type of evolution. Check any evolution textbook for the definition of evolution.