Andrew
A sub-bullet for In Spite Ofa Nail reads "Despite all this, and Dragons being at least an order of magnitude more intelligent than humans, and apparently breeding very quickly, they haven't taken over the world."
Do we have any evidence in the books that dragon intelligence is that high? To be sure, most dragons are very smart and many have an aptitude for math that would qualify themselves as mathematical geniuses, but a full order of magnitude would be god-like intelligence.
I'd say that typical dragon intelligence is at the high end of the human-norm bell curve.
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Well calling them godlike is overstating it but I would guess that given their normal intelligence level plus the long life with which to learn more I would say that they come out high above the average human.
I'd say the Imperials (and Celestials) were distinctly bred for social intelligence - they're a long-lived sort of repository for Chinese culture in their original function. Temeraire shows varieties of curiosity and abstract thought that the English and African breeds don't really match. Clearly all of Novik's dragons have higher-than-human-infant capacities for linguistics, and all seem to have a gift for geometry - but all the ferals introduced have no social structure beyond that of a wolf-pack: I suspect their innate draconic selfishness prevents the development of social structures that would allow those with other intellectual talents to exploit them. In cases where they share a society on a mostly-equal basis, dragons like Lien and the kings of Tswana are able to live up to their potential, but it seems like that level of draconic intelligence relies on symbiosis with a human society.
Regarding Temeraire's name, the page had some confusion about which HMS Temeriare he was named after. I've attempted to fix the page to clarify things on the main page but wanted to put my thoughts on it here in case someone is confused in the future. For the purposes of this there are two HMS Temeraires that we need to be concerned with. The first was a third rate that was captured from the French in 1759. The second was a British-built second rate that was launched in 1798 (which is the subject of The Fighting Temeraire).
Now given the timing Laurence would have been much more likely to be familiar with the second ship than the first. This is reinforced by the fact that when he names Temeraire he notes that he is naming him after a ship that he saw being launched.
So given this we can assume that Temeriare was named after the second HMS Temeriare rather than the first. Now obviously there is a similarity between him and the first ship in that both were captured from the French, which I recall is commented on in the books but this does not seem to have been intentional on Laurence's part (although it presumably was intentional on Naomi Novik's part).