As creatures who have overspecialized in intelligence as a survival strategy, we may very well have overestimated its importance and efficiency. We already suffer greatly for it, including an extravagantly long and high-maintenance childhood needed to educate such a powerful mind, as well as an infant cranial size which is very close to exceeding the capability of the female pelvis.

We can make the assumption that only warm-blooded creatures have an energetic enough metabolism to be able to support our level of intelligence. Warm-blooded creatures, mammals, birds and possibly some dinosaurs, have been around for a long time and only primates and cetaceans seem to have developed intelligence as we choose to define it. And intelligence only recently has evolved into cooperative, language-driven, tool-using intelligence, and only in our lineage. If earth is representative, we can estimate then that it takes on the order of a hundred Myr for intelligence to evolve once the physiological prerequisites are established, and then it doesn't seem too widespread among many species.

The man may be right.