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I love this post, but there are several things in it that I have to take issue with.
You give the example of the asteroid and the tiger as things with different levels of intelligence, making the point that in both cases human beings are able to very rapidly respond with things that are outside the domain under which these entities are able to optimize. In the case of the asteroid, it can't optimize at all. In the case of the tiger, the human is more intelligent and so is better able to optimize over a wider domain.
However, the name of this blog is "overcoming bias," and one of its themes is the areas under which human intelligence breaks down. Just like you can toss poisoned meat to a tiger, there are things you can do to humans with similar effect. You can, for example, play on our strong confirmation bias. You can play tricks on our mind that exploit our poor intuition for statistics. Or, as in the case of Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, you can push us into a domain where we are slower than our opponent. Poisoned meat might do it for a tiger, but are economic bubbles and the "greater fool" pyramid that builds within them any different than this for humans? Aren't opaque mortgage-backed securities like the poisoned meat you toss to the tiger?
Secondly, I often object to the tendency of CS/AI folks to claim that evolution is incredibly slow. Simple iterative mutation and selection is slow and blind, but most of what goes on in evolution is not simple iterative mutation and selection. Evolution has evolved many strategies for evolution-- this is called the evolution of evolvability in the literature. These represent strategies for more efficiently finding local maxima in the fitness landscape under which these evolutionary processes operate. Examples include transposons, sexual reproduction, stress-mediated regulation of mutation rates, the interaction of epigenetics with the Baldwin effect, and many other evolvability strategies. Evolution doesn't just learn... it learns how to learn as well. Is this intelligence? It's obviously not human-like intelligence, but I think it qualifies as a form of very alien intelligence.
Finally, the paragraph about humans coming to parity with nature after 500 years of modern science is silly. Parity implies that there is some sort of conflict or contest going on. We are a part of the natural system. When we build roads and power plants, make vaccines, convert forests to farmland, etc. we are not fighting nature. We are part of nature, so these things are simply nature modifying itself just as it always has. Nuclear power plants are as "natural" as beehives and beaver dams. The "natural" vs. "artificial" dichotomy is actually a hidden form of anthropomorphism. It assumes that we are somehow metaphysically special.