Material Reduction of Intelligence

In the signatures of minds thread commenter Rock wrote:

Most people when asked what is “intelligence,” including most scientists who investigate intelligence, will tick off a short list of skills, abilities, or attributes that they consider intelligent. You don’t have to see many of these list to realize there is a definite pattern, a “Basic Skills Set” “defining” intelligence, in the common conception. Operationalizing these skills involves further decomposition into mechanical actions or operations, materially reproducible, as is always required by science. That’s mostly what AI researchers do.

Based on this comment this looks like a pattern:

Intelligence (manifested by skills)--> Mechanical actions or operations--> Material or physical evidence