This reminds me of the debate of the origins of the Universe. Some religions maintained that the Universe at some point did not exist. Some scientists up t

This reminds me of the debate of the origins of the Universe. Some religions maintained that the Universe at some point did not exist. Some scientists up to very recently maintained (perhaps in opposition to religious views) that the Universe always existed. I'm of the view that animals are a lot smarter than we'd regularly think, but that there is indeed something very special about human intelligence. My prediction would be that we won't be able to uplift even a chimpanzee. And that would be an awesome and debate ending experiment -- if human intelligence is nothing special and it's just a few mutations away from a chimpanzee, just patch the chimpanzee genome with the intelligence genes and see what happens.