To be precise, the argument is that elephants (or other animals in similar situations) *wouldn’t* evolve to human-level intelligence. The fact that they *didn’t* isn’t very much information (for anthropic reasons, because if they did then it’d be them wondering why primates didn’t get to elephant-level intelligence).
And then we should also consider that the elephant environment isn’t a randomly-sampled environment either, but is also correlated with ours (which means we should also anthropically discount this).
To be precise, the argument is that elephants (or other animals in similar situations) *wouldn’t* evolve to human-level intelligence. The fact that they *didn’t* isn’t very much information (for anthropic reasons, because if they did then it’d be them wondering why primates didn’t get to elephant-level intelligence).
And then we should also consider that the elephant environment isn’t a randomly-sampled environment either, but is also correlated with ours (which means we should also anthropically discount this).