Humans, as a species, are basically the same genetically as they were 100,000 years ago, yet we have changed massively in intelligence. We changed 20,000 years ago when nomads formed the first cities, and have changed, and become ever more intelligent in the last 200 years, and more-so last 100 years. There are far more geniuses alive today than in the time of Leonardo da Vinci. Each of us has far more capability, and at a pace far too quickly to be due to genetic evoloution. Why?
I posit that this is because intelligence is not personal but social, and specifically a factor of language and inter-communication. Our brain cells alone are not intelligent, it is their network which makes us so, and our human social network works in the same way to make society, not us individuals, intelligent. Today's animals and plants too are more intelligent than those of the past for this reason; they are part of our society. We can see that horses, for example, are trained by known and documented methods in a way that was not possible in ancient times.
Can we say that plants are today more 'intelligent' than before. In a way cultivation makes them so, even if they lack volition or much power over their environment, they are manipulated by us, by farmers and gardeners, because they give us something in return. It may be a stretch to describe this symbiosis as intelligence, but it is 'in a way', perhaps more of an intelligence than wild plants, those of 50,000 years ago.
Our electronic social media makes all of society yet more intelligent, for intelligence can also be measured by speed. Anyone can build a spacecraft with enough time, designed with pencils and paper, but speed grants us special abilities. Our speed of change and reaction is an essential part of the definition of intelligence, even in common parlance; 'quick witted' for example.
That intelligence is a factor of society, not of the individual is the ultimate retort to Nazism and intellectual elites. A small group of elites would, in isolation, literally be less intelligent than a larger mass.
