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There is an implicit fallacy in your question... there really is no "direction" to evolution. Evolution is nothing more than statistics in action. There have been many, many, many evolutionary leaps that had tremendous survival/success potential. Unfortunately, they took place at the wrong time/place and the mutated organism did not survive to pass on the trait. Evolution rewards success only, not complexity, not size, not efficiency. And the most successful organisms are actually the simplest.
An organism that mutates in a manner to more efficiently exploit its environment will succeed ONLY if it manages to reproduce. Faced with an established, competing, less efficient organism that already dominates that niche, the mutation stands a good chance of never succeeding.
Biological evolution is NOT a process of creating better and better organisms. It is merely the statistical proliferation of organisms to fill all possible environmental niches. It is proliferation, not necessarily improvement.
To an outside observer, it might appear that the process of evolution has been guided either by bacteria or viruses. Many bacteria subsist through the bio-degradation of more complex bio-material provided by the more evolved (?) organisms. Hence, they promoted more and more complex organisms to provide better food sources. Viruses need organic hosts for reproduction, and so developed bacteria and then more complex life-forms to provide just that - the appropriate hosting mechanism. In this light, evolution is guided by the needs of the simpler organisms.
An odd argument, but it illustrates the fallacy of assuming that intelligence is "evolutionarily desirable". There really is no such thing. What is desirable is that which breeds true. Is there an environmental niche that promotes intelligence? If so, it will succeed. If not, it won't. Given our current state of affairs, I wouldn't be surprised if, in a few millennia (no time in evolutionary terms), evolution has ruled out intelligence as a desirable trait.
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