[bee_rider]

In particular, a given elephant might be "more intelligent" than a human -- we just happen to have evolved from a particular niche that has rendered us bizarrely good at abstracting knowledge and combining it with the knowledge of other humans.

[notahacker]

What is "more intelligent" if not "more capable of abstracting, synthesizing and sharing knowledge"?

[bee_rider]

How about the ability to solve novel problems?

We have very good problem solving ability of course, but a superpowered ability to ask others how they solved the problem. If we wanted to somehow define a kind of 'brain horsepower' type intelligence, it seems to me that the former is closer to it than the latter, and it doesn't seem obvious to me that humans would necessarily take the top spot. Or that there's a reasonable/ethical way to test it -- let's take a human, elephant, crow, and dolphin, raise them in total isolation from the any community to get a measure of their untrained intelligence... we might get some interesting results on intelligence, but mostly we will learn something about ballistics as some ethics review board launches us unto the Sun.

[jayd16]

You'd also need the desire for such things.