Post-Darwinian Evolution

I'm sure I'm by no means the first to speculate along these lines. Still...

Do we have the right to say that intelligence is not the programmed outcome of certain species? Though the level achieved by humans has not been matched by any other species, does that mean that, as we’ve been led to believe, intelligent self-awareness, does not have, as it were, a gene or genic component? We think in genetics only of what the individual has been programmed to become, all of that information encoded before birth waiting for the right environmental conditions to obtain in order for it to become what it was “meant to be.” But is this a prejudice born of our limited perspective?

I am not saying that the “gene” I’m looking for is in the double helix. I know no more about genetics than the average citizen, which is to say virtually nothing. The gene is almost certainly an analogy. Moreover I don’t know where one would look for this piece of coding if it exists, whether it might somehow exist outside of the physical being, somewhere in the universe as yet unrecognized by science. The question really is whether the prefrontal cortex was an evolutionary chance or whether, the right conditions being found, the final realization of the programming which was, as it were, designed to grow in that direction all along.