The laryngeal nerve goes in roughly a straight line in fish. With evolutionary development of a neck stretching out, both ends of it are in the neck but the middle is still stuck near the heart. It now goes from brain down to heart, loops around an artery then back up the neck to the larynx. With a giraffe that's a pointless detour of several meters because evolution can't intelligently move it above the artery.[1]

The optic nerve connects to the front of your retina giving you a blind spot, then pokes a hole in the retina to get out to the back and off to the visual cortex which is at the other end of the brain. Intelligent design would do better.

[1] https://forum.donanimhaber.com/store/c9/ef/2d/c9ef2d955e3f99...

There is no intelligence guiding it. If it gets stuck in local maximum there it stays. If routing a vein through the worst possible places works it won't get optimized etc.

Intelligence (in a metric, "this is intelligent way to do X", sense) implies some purpose. But life is just one big 'systems that survive and grow - grow and survive' tautology.

Veering into philosophy perhaps, but intelligence to me is “thinking”.