A way to test your theory is to take a smart creature whose common ancestor with mankind was stupid and see if we could put human level or above intelligence into it by, say, minor gene changes or eliminating its mutational load..
There are many examples of animals not closely related to humans that appear to have nontrivial amounts of intelligence (dolphins, octopuses, some birds). This seems to already constrain the effect Squark hypothesized to acting in a fairly narrow range.
A way to test your theory is to take a smart creature whose common ancestor with mankind was stupid and see if we could put human level or above intelligence into it by, say, minor gene changes or eliminating its mutational load..
There are many examples of animals not closely related to humans that appear to have nontrivial amounts of intelligence (dolphins, octopuses, some birds). This seems to already constrain the effect Squark hypothesized to acting in a fairly narrow range.