Most mammals bear their children when they are almost ready to go with the flow. A Zebra baby has to walk with the herd within a few minutes after birth, otherwise it is left behind. It will need its mother a short time only. Almost all of its behaviour is inborn.
Humans take years to become anything like productive. Human babies die very quickly if not taken care with utmost dedication. While still ‘useless’, after a year or so, they develop a unique high skill: language!
This opens the way to influence their behaviour and allows (together with quite a brain) an immense ability to learn, to build on experience of parents and other role models. Complex bits of knowledge can be passed on to the next generation. We do not have to learn all by trial and error all the time.
This makes humanity uniquely able to adapt and survive in the most diverse environments. It allows culture, science, the arts. It allows extreme specialisation of skills, like the guy who researches nuclear physics but can not boil an egg.
Clearly we shifted the balance between nature and nurture, the genes and the upbringing, far towards the nurture. For an educated professional, it takes 25 years to become ‘useful’, let alone a few student jobs some may have had.
Yet, our most basic reactions to many things remain the same across cultures. Fear of the dark, suspicion towards a stranger, lust for a potential sex partner, the urge to accumulate more, are shared across all mankind. The village square paradigm (check my ‘village square’ bog post) applies globally. This is the ‘nature’ part in us. It is where we seem to continue to need learning by trial and error.
The difference in upbringing, say between the academic wealthy family and an uneducated poor one, makes all the difference in our chances for success in life. Now as much as in historic times. This is one of the issues our societies discuss: inequality in chances.