Apologies for the category choice, it seemed the least irrelevant.
Anyway, crows in Asia are super-bright. So giving them harder and harder to solve problems to get their chickenfeed, the smarter ones will prevail. Run that through a couple of generations and they will be smarter than us*.
So,
Stephen Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA can just outsource all the theoretical stuff and we can go to the stars.
* assuming they aren't already smarter than us and they are just playing dumb**.
** <wonders if the animal kingdom hasn't noticed yet that any species that's not cute, or tasty tend to go extinct?>