I mean if intelligence is such a vast leap forward on the stage of evolution, why don't we see more examples of it?

Because it's incredibly expensive for the creature.

Brains use up an awful lot of energy (ask any survival expert what's the most important part of your body to keep covered to preserve heat). That means you need to eat more to keep yourself going.

Also, large brains equals large heads. The size of the birth canal for a creature which only walks on its hind legs is limited by its requirement to be able to run effectively. Too large a head, and the kid and mother both die in childbirth. Too large a birth canal, and you can't run properly so you can't get away from a predator.

Besides, who says there haven't been more examples of it? Even at our fairly advanced stage of science, we couldn't survive an extinction-level event like the various huge meteorite strikes in the past, and we have nothing which would survive a few million years of burial, so there could have been civilisations back in the dinosaur days which got blitzed. No evidence either way. And for modern intelligence, we have chimps, gorillas, bonobos, dolphins, elephants and crows, all of which have pretty high functioning intelligence, to the extent of using tools, having information stored at a tribal level and passed down through the generations, etc.. We just happen to be the best at the moment.

Living things are so comlex and so mysterious that the most brilliant self-organized minds that have ever been know to exist cannot duplicate what must have been a chance event of simple chemical interactions? Not one cell. not one virus. Nothing. We can't do it.

We can't do it right this minute. But it's being worked on very seriously, including people deliberately taking a non-DNA path to try and prove that it can be done. Given that people have only known the detail of how this stuff works for about 30 years, only had the technical ability (tools) to do anything about it for 20 years, and only had the ability to do it *cheaply* for 10 years, this isn't bad going.

Graham.