What Isn't Intelligence

the short version (at least to my eyes): " Agüera y Arcas goes even further. He argues that prediction is intelligence: “Is the emergence of intelligence merely a side effect of ‘solving’ prediction, or are prediction and intelligence actually equivalent?” He favors the latter. Not only is an internal model of the world or others good, he argues, when it effectively predicts the future—it is also good merely because it can, and does: “In fact, evolutionarily speaking, only creatures with models that successfully predict their own future even have a future!”

But I cannot agree with the remarks about evolution. Genetic changes don't anticipate anything. Random mutations occur always, and the result is that rare mutations provide unanticipated advantages in unanticipated future circumstances. I can't imagine any other long-term advantages. Sure, we can direct "evolution" in the short term, say, the way dog breeders do, but long-term survival is subject to randomness. Or is this view oversimplistic?