Fire is rad but I don’t see how it explains modern civilization.

If most animals are operating on a calorie deficit and fixing this can lead to larger brains then why haven’t domesticated animals evolved towards our level of intelligence?

I don't think fire and therefore cooked food was THE change, though I think it definitely helped, but

>If most animals are operating on a calorie deficit and fixing this can lead to larger brains then why haven’t domesticated animals evolved towards our level of intelligence?

Because farm animals do not evolve, they are bred. We have directed their evolutionary paths for centuries, away from what it would do on it's own, towards creatures that produce more milk, more meat, or fattier meat.

Probably because our interference with their breeding selects for non-smart qualities.

What interference? The animal world was free to evolve for the majority of the history of the earth. Literally millions of years and nothing came of it. Until we came along.

Domestication, the process we put animals in to make them peaceful enough to provide a calorie surplus without stomping the early humans to death because they got scared by a branch

Modern civilization is multi-special.

From a calories-per-unit-of-labor standpoint, dogs and cats have now clearly eclipsed humanity, using their emotional intelligence to create a post-scarcity Marxian utopia where they can mostly do whatever they want all day while humans toil for them.