Humans are conscious which means we experience things, then we develop preferences for certain experiences, then we develop skills for achieving those preferences.
Without consciousness, what is there to be aware of? And why would intelligence emerge and/or what end would it serve?
Clearly other animals have "phenomenological experience" i.e. consciousness / qualia without being as intelligent as humans (or necessarily "self aware"). Many people believe consciousness is simply a side effect of intelligence rather than the other way around.
Eg we optimize for survival but without the ability to experience things, why survive?
Why would that instinct or any other preference for a course of action emerge?
But your body is just a robot suit for replicating nucleic acids and you can follow an unbroken chain of those chemical reactions all the way to the first microbes. Which were still "optimizing for survival" without any intelligence beyond following chemical gradients.
If you say that means even microbes have some amount of qualia then I can't dispute it. Pure physicalism may necessitate panpsychism of some form.
However, it makes more sense to me that consciousness precedes the will to survive. And that doesn't mean the way a microbe experiences life is the same as us. E.g. the fact that we have so much control over our environment might mean we have a much more sensitive and reactive way of engaging with consciousness, whereas maybe a microbe is like an enlightened monk, just chillin because it can't do much about what it experiences anyways.