So, a sufficiently large and complex, multi-component, knowledge-free physicochemical machine is capable of producing every sort of intelligence, and every sort of product of intelligence, that has so far turned up on earth, without needing an external teacher or programmer, though it may take a very long time and require a huge amount of parallelism to allow effects of competition and cooperation to play a major role, and also to allow high level requirements to feed back into very low-level designs (e.g. adding neural computation to chemical computation, and also extending chemical computation by selecting more complex forms that serve higher level needs).

Results include Euclid's Elements, the idea of a Universal Turing Machine, proofs of incomputability and undecidability, sonnets, plays, paintings, symphonies, skyscrapers, airliners, bombs, democracies, dictatorships, wars, pandemics, and these notes.

Could it be refuted? At least the evidence could be challenged, e.g. by providing evidence that some life form from another part of the universe interfered with biological evolution on earth, including feeding in philosophical, mathematical, scientific, and artistic goals and ideas. But that would merely shift the claim to refer to a larger subset of the physical universe.

As far as I know there was no such influence, though something not very different was the influence of optical radiation from planets and stars, presenting changing patterns in the sky that prompted ancient thinkers to try to impose a structure on the observed motions. It is not obvious that Newton would have come up with his mechanical theories and his new mathematics if he and his predecessors had not been faced with the tutorial problem of explaining observed "heavenly" movements.

NOTE 1