You are right that the quoted passage is not without meaning; what is missing here (and by "here", I mean the whole paper) is any remotely good argument from th

You are right that the quoted passage is not without meaning; what is missing here (and by "here", I mean the whole paper) is any remotely good argument from the relatively trivial factual claim in this passage, to the conclusion that true artificial intelligence is impossible. The factual claim is about the history of evolution: if we take that history to include everything produced during that history, then it is trivially true that the whole is greater than any subset of the things it produced - but so what? It is true for the creation of a microprocessor as well. There is no argument here that rules out the creation of artificial intelligence that does not also apply to the creation of microprocessors.