Evolving to extinction nearly happened to Homo sapiens. This huge peacock's tail of a brain - which we grew just to do chimpanzee tribal politics better - really, that was the entire reason - causes a massive metabolic drain and makes our reproduction horribly difficult, frequently killing the mother and leaving infants helpless for years and with a horrible early mortality rate.

If the bottleneck 50,000 years ago had killed all of us instead of leaving a couple of thousand, we'd be a perfect example for the next intelligent species to use.

We're just lucky that evolution came up with general intelligence as a solution to convincing that other chimp to give you the fruit, and that general intelligence turned out to be quite useful for some other things.