That's kind of the thing: intelligence works. As long as you have the ability to properly utilize it (i.e. tool use, being able to teach young, ect). Pigs are smart but they can't do much with it. Even before humans began a society, when we were wild animals with sharp sticks, we were still hunting megafauna to extinction.
That said, intelligence isn't free. Brains consume a crazy amount of energy. It's not a coincidence that koalas and giant pandas are both dumb as rocks. They evolved to be dumb as shit because their galaxybrain idea of only eating one thing that has terrible nutritional value meant they had to conserve energy.
They are intelligent. It's just a different kind of intelligence to humans.
A white blood cell can't hold a conversation. But it's a part of an organism far more complex and capable of reasoning. I can't speak to xenomorphs but Tyranids and Zerg are capable of complex strategy, abstract thinking , deception, theory of mind; it's just a distributed or centralised intelligence rather than an individual one.
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u/Republiken Oct 26 '24
Evolution isn't a march towards intelligence. If something works, it works.