Sibylla Bostoniensis

The potentially cheerful thing is that we're nigh-eusocial; cultural evolution is faster and more capable than biological.

Along those lines, I recently read The Secret of Our Success, which argues that raw human problem-solving skills aren't substantially better than other primates: what really sets us apart is our ability to learn from each other, to the point where genetic and cultural evolution are now in a mutually-reinforcing ratchet.

It also argues that cultures often end up producing adaptations over time that are "smarter" (more adaptive) than any member of that culture could have come up with individually, and that empirically individuals may not even understand how/why some adaptations work - just, "this is the way we do things" (because the people who didn't do things that way didn't survive to propagate their culture). It's a really interesting read.