I once saw a person from Korea discover, much to her surprise, that pennies are not red. She had been able to speak English for a while and could correctly identify a stop sign or blood as red, and she had seen plenty of pennies before discovering this.
In Korea they put the color of pennies and the color of blood in the same category and give that category a Korean name.
Did Hofstadter explain the remark?
Maybe he felt that the difference between Einstein and a village idiot was larger than between a village idiot and a chimp. Chimps can be pretty clever.
Or, maybe he thought that the right end of the scale, where the line suddenly becomes dotted, should be the location of the rightmost point that represents something real. It’s very conventional to switch from a solid to a dotted line to represent a switch from confirmed data to projections.
But I don’t buy the idea of intelligence as a scalar value.