“Q: Isn’t intelligence tied to cortex volume/thickness, not necessarily the over

–“Q: Isn’t intelligence tied to cortex volume/thickness, not necessarily the overall brain size?”–

Technically, it’s not so much cranial volume but:
1) the surface area (cortical volume) within the cranium (More folding) 2) number of neural micro colums (basic unit of computation), 3) neural number and density, and something to do with the fact that most neurons are inhibitory. 4) and there is a minimum tolerable distance between neural microcolumns. 5) it appears we obtained memory recursion and prediction from what was earlier akin to chimp persistence, and this is probably the best explanation of intelligence: recursion=prediction of complexity in time. (Which the AI discipline is rapidly beginning to understand at the moment): parallelism(disambiguation), prediction (association), and recursion (wayfinding).