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Notes -
I'm arguing they're closely related.
Intelligence isn't parasitic on whatever the 'really valuable' things are? Elaborate? Is one, personally, building something or uncovering a beautiful result in mathematics, really valueless in a way that, uh, playing basketball with your kid isn't? It'd be very weird for "teaching your kid math" to have "intrinsic value" but the material action of doing math to not have value, when the former is an evolutionary adaptation that exists for the purpose of the latter (albeit with math substituted for "knapping flint" or something).
The core part here is knowing what is good and bad, which is what "understanding their effects" meant above. You're referring to the "is/ought" distinction here - except oughts seem to depend quite intimately on ises, a person dying is important because ... they die, which is an "is"!
The core point, though, is that the human lives morality seems to be oriented around have content - if you stop someone from dying, this causes them to ... live longer and experience and do more things, and this seems to be why dying is bad, and preventing dying is good. But why stop at saying 'and all humans are the same', when the experiences/lives, which are the only things that actually change when you e.g. save a life, can differ so much? Is "saving the life" of a cancer patient ... for fifteen minutes, after which they actually die quite the same as saving the life of a ten year old, who'll live another 70 years + have children? Okay, is saving the life of someone who's severely physically and intellectually disabled, and will be tube-fed and gurgle for 20 years until dying of some hospital-acquired infection quite the same? No, and it's because their experiences will lack most of what's worthwhile. Okay - now someone who's slightly less severely intellectually disabled - say at the level of a two-year-old until death. They'll ... also lack most of the experiences most humans have, meaning caring for them causes much less than caring for a non-disabled two year old, who'll mature and have many of the glorious experiences humans do! One can compare that to an animal - whose experiences have some value, but who you'd surely claim are worth less than a human, despite them being quite similar at a high level - animals feel for and care for their kin, eat, try to solve problems they have, struggle against nature, etc.
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