If you listen to recent talks by Hinton (Capsule networks), LeCun (self-supervised learning), and Bengio (system 2 deep learning), as well as others, you'll find plenty of references to neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, etc. There are always implementation differences, but the inspiration from brains is always there. The point of the book (which might be wrong, btw) is that the brain itself is an agent of the gene, which has evolved out of the need for better survival mechanisms. Therefore, it is suggesting that anything that has been modeled after the brain is—by extension—an agent of the main source of human intelligence (because it serves the goals of humans) and not intelligent by itself.