Our genus, homo, far exceeds the intelligence of any other animal and has only done so for a few hundred thousand years. In nature, however, intelligence gradually increases when you graph things like EQ but humans are just an exceptional dot that is basically unrivaled. This suggests that humans are a significant statistical outlier obviously. It is also a fact that many ancient organisms had lower intelligence than our modern organisms. Across most species such as birds, mammals, etc intelligence has gradually increased over time. Is it possible that humans are an example of rapid and extremely improbable evolution towards intelligence? One would expect that in an evolutionary arms race, the intelligence of predator and prey species should converge generally (you might have a stupid species and a smart species but they're going to be in the same ballpark). Is it possible that humanity broke from a cosmic tradition of slow growth in intelligence over time?