alt Hacker NewsThe world we live in is a construct, not a natural outcome. Even if we take your premise at face value, that our success as a species is only because of advantages over others, what's to say that "intelligence" is that advantage? What's to say that we don't use our advantages to reconstruct a world that works in a way that doesn't advantage intelligence over all else?
And on intelligence specifically: even amongst the human race, we all know smart people who are abject failures, and idiots who are wildly successful. Intelligence is vastly overrated.
IQ is among the best predictors of life success, for humans. Being up by an extra SD in the g dimension covers a multitude of sins.
I'm not sure what level of delusion one has to run to look at human civilization and say "no, intelligence wasn't important for this". It's pretty obvious that human world is a product of intelligence applied at scale - and machines can beat humans at intelligence and scale both.