Yes, you're right. Relatively speaking, we have come quite far from 10 years ago. Using Google Now, searching for objects on Google+, doing facial recognition b

Yes, you're right. Relatively speaking, we have come quite far from 10 years ago. Using Google Now, searching for objects on Google+, doing facial recognition better than the average human, winning Jeopardy are all amazing achievements. But as you have noted, we have been able to pin down some of the more methodical parts. I was mainly focusing on the fact that what the brain does is still amazing, and if we were to list all the different forms of intelligence it exhibits, we probably have a very long way to go. In no way is it simple and neither do we understand how it can do cognition, connect semantic concepts and reason about them so well as it does. Topics such as creativity, intuition, thinking, feeling that we witness human subjects exhibit are still fringe topics with much debate. So the original assertion that the brain is unnecessarily complex in its design and was simply a process of trial and error may be unfounded, until we can demonstrate better or even point to/simulate/emulate some mechanism that would give rise to a human's intelligence by hit and trial.