Well, my mom owns a border collie, so I’m a lot humbler than you are.
I am really out of my depth in this discussion, but here are my 2 cents anyway.
Could a “meta-organism” consisting of a hundred brilliant physicists have discovered and explained Relativity to the world? No - one Einstein was all that was needed.
Intelligence and complex problem solving capabilities of individuals do not “add up” and contribute to making the “meta organism” in some sense smarter than the smartest individuals that make up that species. Of course cooperation in a social setting helps with problems where individual efforts are additive and results in outcomes far larger than an individual could accomplish. But intelligence per se is not additive.
An anthill cannot solve a problem that the smartest ant in that colony could not solve. There is no “hive intelligence.”
No it was not Einstein alone. It was Einstein advancing on top of ideas and using the tools of generations before him and inspiring others to take the ideas in other directions that were fruitful even though he disagreed. The quote of standing on the shoulders of giants is Newton’s but one suspects Einstein would have said the same.
Ant colonies and hives and termite colonies do solve problems that the smartest ant or bee or termite do not comprehend let alone have the ability to solve.
Einstein was ahead of his time. Yes, the brilliant physicists of the day would have eventually got around to his 1905 work in another 20 years without him. And General Relativity in another 20. What surprises me is that he was really the only person I know of working on General Relativity between 1905 and 1915. Again, that I know of. Everybody knew of the problem extending the special situation had, why weren’t they working away at it like a madman, like Einstein was?
What I find interesting is that of species generally considered to have the most human-like intelligence, the great apes, aren’t exactly doing too well. What does that mean, that humans are a fluke, and intelligence isn’t especially advantageous? That humans competed for the same ecological niche, and out-competed them?
There isn’t a definitive answer to those questions but as noted above great apes along with other primates and even several non-primate species have shown strong indications that they possess theory of mind. That ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, to be aware that others have their own distinct thoughts, beliefs, emotions, motives, etc, is believed by some to be the most significant factor in terms of our cognitive evolution.
For a long time it was believed humans were the only beings that have it. But finding ways to test for it that indicates to us (based on the way we understand things) that it exists in other species (based on the way we theorize they understand things) is a guessing game subject to lots of trial and error. Newer tests in the last 10-15 years have repeatedly suggested other species have it too. And it is theorized it probably exists in many others still, but we just don’t know how to test for it in a way that is meaningful to us and appropriate for them at the same time.
There is no absolute proven answer to these questions, but this study (PDF) pretty much sums up a widely held theory about why this ability was critical in our cognitive evolution, and how at least in some capacity chimps in this case have it too.
If this is the case it means the debate isn’t about whether or not they could develop human-like cognition but rather since they have developed it at the very fundamental level, why didn’t it allow them to take a similar evolutionary trajectory? The answer, IMHO, is that they may yet. A few million years give or take is just a blink of an eye, so we aren’t necessarily all that far ahead of them in the big picture. And as noted there is no reason to believe that couldn’t be the case with marine life as well.
It may be that almost human-like intelligence is not enough. Bear in mind that anatomically modern humans appeared around 200,000 Years ago, but modern human behavior is believed to have appeared only 50,000 years ago.
It may also be the case that intelligence itself may not necessarily confer evolutionary advantages over other traits. Humans went a long time before establishing itself as a dominant species. More to the point is the fact that our genus (homo) was not particularly successful, considering that all the species in the genus became exiting except for humo sapiens.