According to the "Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis," what makes humans unique is our advanced social reasoning. In experiments, two-year-old toddlers performed no better than chimps on physical IQ tests (like tool use) but vastly outperformed them on social tasks like inferring intent from eye movements.

The assumption that superintelligence will inevitably rule is flawed. In human society, raw IQ is not the primary determinant of power, as evidenced by PhDs often working for MBAs. This suggests an AGI wouldn't automatically dominate humanity simply by being smarter.

While IQ can correlate with success in math-heavy sciences, research shows it has no predictive power for creative achievement in fields like writing, visual arts, or music. This highlights how our societal definition of intelligence often overlooks entire domains of human talent.

Cultures without writing develop extraordinary verbatim memory as a survival mechanism for knowledge transfer. This cognitive skill atrophies once information can be offloaded to written text, much like navigation skills decline with GPS, showing a trade-off between technology and innate ability.

While hunter-gatherer life seems cognitively demanding, their genetic profile predicts dramatically lower scores on modern intelligence tests. The subsequent rise in Europe's average score was driven primarily by the migration of farming populations with a different genetic setpoint, not gradual evolution within the hunter-gatherer lineage.

The idea of a single 'general intelligence' or IQ is misleading because key cognitive abilities exist in a trade-off. For instance, the capacity for broad exploration (finding new solutions) is in tension with the capacity for exploitation (efficiently executing known tasks), which schools and IQ tests primarily measure.

Compared to other social hunters or domesticated species, dogs do not possess exceptional cognitive abilities in areas like problem-solving or navigation. Their intelligence is adapted for their evolutionary niche, not for passing human-centric tests. This challenges our biased view of animal smarts.

The tragic Franklin expedition, whose crew perished in the Arctic despite being well-equipped, demonstrates that raw intelligence is insufficient for survival. In contrast, the local Inuit thrived by using a vast body of cumulative cultural knowledge. Our species' primary advantage is our ability to learn from others.

The Flynn effect shows a decades-long rise in IQ scores. This is driven by our modern world, from children's books to complex work, which rewards abstract reasoning and pattern recognition—not an increase in innate "smartness." The gains are on abstract tasks, not concrete ones.