Despite the anthropic principle, we should still expect to have been produced in a relatively likely way for intelligence to have been produced; it would still be surprising for us to observe ourselves to have evolved from chimps so quickly, conditioned on it being extremely hard to go from chimp to human.

...well, in general. In this particular case, it could also be, say, that conditions selecting for intelligence are very unlikely to persist for more than a few million years, but I can't think of any independent reason to think that likely.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure most of Eliezer's statements about evolution are just slogans to illustrate arguments with deeper support.