The world we live in is a construct, not a natural outcome. Even if we take your premise at face value, that our success as a species is only because of advantages over others, what's to say that "intelligence" is that advantage? What's to say that we don't use our advantages to reconstruct a world that works in a way that doesn't advantage intelligence over all else?

And on intelligence specifically: even amongst the human race, we all know smart people who are abject failures, and idiots who are wildly successful. Intelligence is vastly overrated.