There is no drive of life. There are simply chemical reactions and environmental forces that select for one set of reactions over another. Sometimes that leads to greater cognitive abilities, and other times it leads to faster runners, higher flyers, or stickier barnacles. It's only by our own conceit that we believe there is a preferential drive toward the development of smarter organisms like ourselves.
When you get down to it humans are simply homes for microorganisms, which vastly outnumber us and have been around far longer. Taking the long view intelligence may be a poor adaptation. The dinosaurs ruled Earth for tens of millions of years. We have been around for a few hundred thousand years and are on the brink of destroying ourselves.