I think you’ve put your finger on it: a lot of the linear thinking is egoistic. The most obvious example is the monotheist’s focus on eschatology, on the progressive view of history introduced by Zoroastrianism. Monotheists want heaven to arrive in the glorious future, because they personally want to live forever. It’s the ego’s fear of death.

The problem is that what we’re calling “ego” is what distinguishes us from the other species, psychological speaking. The self consists of consciousness, instrumental rationality, and autonomy among some other cognitive faculties. Much of the ego’s control over events is illusory, as Buddhists say, but the anomalies of human history and of the Anthropocene indicate that our control over ourselves and our environment isn’t wholly unreal.

So the ego is to some extent real as an emergent property. As you say, nature is responsible for evolving the conditions for that property of personhood to emerge. But once it emerges, it seems to me we have the basis of a conflict between the natural and ego-oriented, self-interested, semi-solipsistic artificiality. We have an emergent level of being that seeks to be anti-natural, to undo replace natural norms by injecting human intention, purpose, and functionality (programs and conventions) into the wilderness, to humanize our environment.

You ask how the biological form of creativity is inferior to the human one. Remember there are two questions here, the descriptive and the prescriptive: what is in fact happening and what ought to happen? The answer to the first question is clearly that most people prefer to live in artificial, linear-thinking habitats, not in the wilderness, which means our species has effectively set ourselves up in opposition to nature since at least the dawn of civilization.

As for the prescriptive question of whether human creativity is superior to nature’s or whether we ought to root for our survival at nature’s expense, because the introduction of intelligent life in the universe somehow dignifies or vindicates nature’s mindless indifference, I’m ambivalent about this. On existentialist grounds of tragic heroism I celebrate human creativity, but I also appreciate the foolishness of egoism. For example, we become corrupted by concentrations of power and masculinity becomes toxic and psychopathic. We become blindly self-destructive, as in civilization’s threat to the ecosystems. Human progress is ambiguous at best.