you're not wrong. unfortunately it's about the only thing that will pass an ethics board, outside of patients who are already having neurosurgery and consent to more invasive procedures.
I'd argue that it's not intelligence alone that lets us land a machine on the moon — it's our cooperation, written language, learned culture, communication. An individual person cannot land a machine on the moon on their own. It is not intelligence that produces that, but intelligence contained and continually improved upon within a superorganism of social culture.
Yes, but it requires intelligence for cooperation to be evolutionarily viable. Dumb but cooperative animals are too easy for a freeloader to take advantage of.
And it obviously requires massive intelligence for written language and high fidelity communication.
I think that there are two sides of an intelligence, intelligence as an inborn ability to become intelligent and intelligence as the result of the process of becoming intelligent. People are more intelligent then animals in the first sense, AND they developed a process of training the "raw" inborn intelligence into an adult mind.
Yes! It evolved at least 25 times (that we know of). Animals, plants, algae, fungi, etc. all invented multicellularity independently and in many of those groups did so multiple times.
