Wow, long time no see.
Interesting essay, think you made most of your points, some of those lines definitely convey very common misunderstanding of selection (I won't use evolution, most of those instances could have been rendered less distasteful by referring selection than evolution in general, to me, but in common lexicon they are synonymous. Not in actually but...)
I'd say some of it was a touch nit picky, I never thought of Pemalites "fully evolved" as being some sort of pinnacle species, rather they are just old, and had a society so free of concern that they lost all aggression. From a biological sense, very unlikely, but really I think is just how things are written more than the underlying tone.
The shark brain thing: the fundamentals of survival, eat, live, breed. Obviously humans are good at that, but we characterize things like sharks as specialist in it, considering how much we do that is not, or indirect to those activities. For sharks it's most of what we know of them. And sharks feeding is engaging to watch.
And I actually made a response to the recapitulation thing in the thread for 11 some time ago. It wasn't good, and again KAA may have been conveying something that science does not but, again....
Really, I'm going to pretend I have any idea why she wrote this things as she did.
She is trying to convey something scientific theory doesn't, an existential reason of who we are and why we are here. Putting a teleological point on science for many is more satisfying then being told life is another set of chemical reactions. It is trying to infuse a purpose that, actually there or not the science doesn't address, but is more comforting to the observer to have reason and meaning in everything. And I think that's part of why this misconception of selection remains in so much of the public.
I'll be optimistic, and say she wasn't deliberately distorting theory, but that still carries the message that this topic needs to be addressed better in scientific education.