As far as AI designers go, evolution has to be one of the worst. It randomly changes the genetic code, and then selects on the criterion of ingroup reproductive fitness - in other words, how well a being can reproduce and stay alive - it says nothing about the goals of that being while it's alive.
To survive, and increase one's power are instrumentally convergent goals of any intelligent agent, which means that evolution does not select for any specific type of mind, ethics, or final values.
And yet, it created humans and not paperclip maximizers. True, humans rebelled against and overpowered evolution, but in the end we ended up creating amazing things and not a universe tiled with paperclips(or DNA, for that matter).
Considering how neural network training and genetic algorithms are considered some of the most dangerous ways of creating an AI,
the fact that natural evolution managed to create us with all our goals of curiosity and empathy and love and science,
would be a very unlikely coincidence given that we assume that most AIs we could create are worthless in terms of their goals and what they will do with the universe. Did it happen by chance? The p-value is pretty small on this one.
Careless evolution managed to create humans on her first attempt at intelligence, but humans, given foresight and intelligence, have an extreme challenge making sure an AI is friendly? How can we explain this contradiction?
But, as you also point out, evolution "selects on the criterion of ingroup reproductive fitness", which does select for a specific type of mind and ethics, especially if you also have the constraint, that the agent should be intelligent. As far as I am aware all of the animals considered the most intelligent are social animals (octopi may be an exception?). The most important aspect of an evolutionary algorithm is the fitness function. The real world seems to impose a fitness function, that, if it selects for intelligence, it also seems to select for sociability, something that generally seems like it would increase friendliness.
Evolution among humans is as real as it is among any lifeform. Until every human being born is actually genetically designed from scratch there is evolutionary pressure favoring some genes over others.
Humans are not friendly. There are countless examples of humans, who, if they had the chance, would make the world into a place that is significantly worse for most humans. The reason none of them have succeeded yet is that so far no one has had a power/intelligence advantage so large that they could just impose their ideas unilaterally onto the rest of humanity.