People have recently enabled one person with spinal injury to walk via implanted microchips on each side of the injury and a wireless bridge. So that’s very strong evidence it is within groups of baseline human capabilities. https://www.news-medical.net/news/20230526/A-groundbreaking-...
We don’t have DNA sequences for more intelligent humans because we haven’t tried to find them. It’s easy to point to things not done and say it’s yet to happen, but that doesn’t mean such things are beyond our comprehension.
As to math advancing via individual effort, it seems that way because we lump success to the individual. Fermat’s last theorem wasn’t some major effort but there was real progress in the community and the “lone wolf person” actually benefited from both collaboration (people pointed out a problem with his initial proof etc) and advances that didn’t exist until quite recently. That’s the thing problems become easier when you have access to the correct tools.
Having to use microchips on each side of the injury is very strong evidence that it's not within our ability to fix properly.
Having not done something cannot be used as evidence that it is within our comprehension. It might be, it might not be, but "we haven't tried" is no evidence at all. Whereas "our intelligence must have finite limits" is evidence that somethings will be beyond us, even if we don't know exactly what.
But would ten thousand idiots have been able to use those mathematical advances to prove Fermat's Last Theorem? If not then there are limits to the "groups of people can do things one person can't".
We don’t have DNA sequences for more intelligent humans because we haven’t tried to find them. It’s easy to point to things not done and say it’s yet to happen, but that doesn’t mean such things are beyond our comprehension.
As to math advancing via individual effort, it seems that way because we lump success to the individual. Fermat’s last theorem wasn’t some major effort but there was real progress in the community and the “lone wolf person” actually benefited from both collaboration (people pointed out a problem with his initial proof etc) and advances that didn’t exist until quite recently. That’s the thing problems become easier when you have access to the correct tools.