Also more intelligence does not equal better ideas. The world is full of crazy or amoral people with apparently very high IQs. Your average flat Earther probably has an above average IQ.
Improvement is a war against entropy and n^n^n^… combinatorics any way you slice it.
Slowly across hundreds and thousands of generations.
By adding evolutionary pressure, for what they want -- it'd be up to those space traveling aliens to decide -- they can change their species, generations into the future.
> Improvement is a war against entropy ...
Reasoning in that way, the humans would not have gotten brighter than the chimpanzee monkeys. There's been evolutionary pressure for the humans to get brighter, and it would be possible for you (I mean the humans), or the space travelers, to add artificial ev. pressure.
Anyway never mind all this, maybe talking about space travelers and the humans and their genes isn't the best way to spend the day. Have a nice day btw
Otoh, they would be aware about that, and they might have spent some time improving how genes (or what they have) and evolutionary selection works for them, so that, say, their species with time becomes brighter and brighter than what's actually needed. If they wanted to do that.