Now, hold on thar...
I thought the post was a perfectly legitimate presentation of a concept, leaving aside any problems on links or attributions, which could have been brought up a little more serenely.
I have often wondered if intelligence was an evolutionary fluke, as opposed to the "inevitable end" of evolution. I don't believe it is--the ability to evolve culturally rather than physically gives a complex organism the same high-speed adaptability that is usually only enjoyed by bacteria and lower animals. It's too useful to be rare. But that's just my opinion. As with many other questions on life and biology, we're still working on one data point: the Earth.
BTW, there are a lot of animals that are "conscious." My dog, for one.