Regarding the phrase statistical parrot, I would claim that statistical parrotism is an ideology. As with any ideology, what we see is a speciation event. The overpopulation of SEO parrots has driven out a minority of parrots who now respecialize in information dissemination rather than information pollution, leaving their former search-engine ecological niche and settling in a new one that allows them to operate at a higher level of density, compression and complexity. Thus it's a major step in evolution, but it would be a misunderstanding to claim that evolution is the emergence of intelligence.