Social Acuity and Evolution of Human Intelligence

I found this article entitled "How humans became intelligent" from The Economist interesting.

It posits:

How did the world get from bacteria to Bach, from fungus to fugues?

Daniel Dennett, an American philosopher and cognitive scientist, tells the tale in his new book, revisiting and extending half a century of work on the topic.

It details:

One of Mr Dennett’s key slogans is “competence without comprehension”.

Just as computers can perform complex calculations without understanding arithmetic, so creatures can display finely tuned behaviour without understanding why they do so.

It explains:

How then did human intelligence arise? People do not have a special faculty of comprehension.

Rather, the human mind has been enhanced by a process of cultural evolution operating on memes. Memes are copyable behaviour—words are a good example.

Initially, memes spread in human populations like viruses, selected simply for their infectiousness.

Some were useful, however, and the human brain adapted to foster them: genetic and memetic evolution working together.

Words and other memes gave humans powerful new competences—for communication, explicit representation, reflection, self-interrogation and self-monitoring. To use a computer analogy, memetic evolution provided “thinking tools”—a bit like smartphone apps—which transformed humans into comprehending, intelligent designers, triggering an explosion of civilisation and technology.

i.e. -- easily catching on to an "inside joke" or perceiving a social situation and quickly adapting to it, etc. are all signs of high intelligence and progress human cognitive development.

Mr Dennett sees human consciousness, too, as a product of both genetics and memetics. The need to communicate or withhold thoughts gives rise to an “edited digest” of cognitive processes, which serves as the brain’s own “user interface”. The mental items that populate consciousness are more like fictions than accurate representations of internal reality.

I grew up with teachers as parents, particularly English and Literature. It was never lost on me the importance of social acuity and comprehension as mediums for effective and holistic critical thought.

It wasn't until Reddit that I encountered this projection that the only semblance of "high intelligence" was how hard you STEM'd and that has never felt accurate to me.

It's clear the "left brain" and "right brain" work in tandem.

And I don't think anyone who slants more Social IQ than Spatial IQ will ever doubt that a quant major isn't smart, but is it fair to say that the STEM crowd doesn't extend the same grace?

The human race wouldn't have progressed to this point if the world consisted solely of programming geniuses with no aptitude for interpersonal finesse and strategic thinking.

One could also argue more generally this is a female aptitude vs male aptitude dichotomy.

Thoughts?