> Vision has evolved frequently and quickly in the animal kingdom. Conscious intelligence has not.

Three times, something like intelligence has evolved - in mammals, octopuses, and corvids. Completely different neural architectures in those unrelated speces.

Why carve out the corvid from the other birds ? Some parots and parakeets species are playing in the same league as the corvids.

I won't judge our distant relatives, the cephalopods and chicken theropods, but we big apes are pretty dumb.

Even with what we've got, it took us hundreds of thousands of years to invent indoor plumbing.

Vision, I still submit, is much simpler than "intelligence". It's evolved independently almost a hundred times.

It's also hypothesized that it takes as few as a hundred thousand years to evolve advanced eye optics:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.1994.004...

Even plants can sense the visual and physical world. Three dimensional spatial relationships and paths and rays through them are not hard.