No, intelligence is one tool among many which the blind idiot god uses. It is a particularly useful tool for species that can have widely varied enviornments. Unfortunately, it is a resource intensive tool.

Given the available routes to general intelligence available to "the blind idiot god" due to the characteristics it does optimize for. We have a language breakdown here.

The reason I said intelligence is 'extraneous' to evolution was because evolution only 'seeks out' local minima for perpetuation of the genome. What specific configuration a given local minimum happens to be is extraneous to the algorithm. Intelligence is in the available solution space but it is extraneous to the process. Which is why generalists often lose out to specialists in limited environments. (Read: the pigmy people who "went back to the trees".)

Intelligence is not a goal to evolution; it is extraneous to its criteria. Intelligence is not the metric by which evolution judges fitness. Successful perpetuation of the genome is. Nothing else.

You seem to be confusing two different notions of intelligence. One is the either/or "is it intelligent" and the other is how intelligent it is.

Not at all. Not even remotely. I'm stating that any agent -- a construct (biological or synthetic) that can actively select amongst variable results; a thing that makes choices -- inherently values intelligence; the capacity to 'make good choices'. A more-intelligent agent is a 'superior' agent, instrumentally speaking.

Any time there is an intelligent designed agent, the presence of said intelligence is a hard indicator of the agent valuing intelligence. Designed intelligences are "designed to be intelligent". (This is tautological). This means that whoever designed that intelligence spent effort and time on making it intelligent. That, in turn, means that its designer valued that intelligence. Whatever goalset the designer imparted into the designed intelligence, thusly, is a goalset that requires intelligence to be effected.

Which in turn means that intelligence is definitionally instrumentally useful to a designed intelligence.

It is not possible to intentionally design a trait into a system without that trait being valuable to the system.

I'm not sure what you mean here.

What gives you trouble with it? Try rephrasing it and I'll 'correct' said rephrasing towards my intended meaning as possible, perhaps? I want to be understood. :)