SEE BELOW; there is an extremely logical answer
ONLY TO SOMEONE WHO LACKS ALL THE RELEVANT DATA. See below.
PERSONHOOD IS NOT LEARNED. It is a side-effect of learning other things, as explained below.
NOPE. Because personhood is a mental status, not a learned thing, as I'm about to explain (wanted to get through that other stuff above first).
The first relevant Fact is, most animals have some built-in adaptability, allowing them to better-handle the environments in which they find themselves. For example if a boy is raised at high altitude, he will have a greater lung capacity and a higher red-blood-cell count than if he had been raised at sea level. "Genetic drift" tends to happen when some group, originally adapted for one environment, moves to and stays in the another somewhat different environment for a long time. Think of the skin-color of humans, for example, very much lighter in the Northern temperate zone, than in the tropics where humans first evolved. But here only adaptability matters, not genetic drift. For a specific example of human adaptability, see the story of
Tori Allen.
The next relevant Fact is, many animals can learn some "abstract" things, like when we give them names, they can learn to respond to those names. With our large brains, humans can learn many more abstract things than most other animals, but that doesn't mean they are severely restricted. See the part of
this video about a dog's ability.
The next relevant Fact is, the paleontological record clearly shows that humans have been discovering and inventing stuff for literally millions of year (from crude stone tools to fire to basket weaving and more). The KEY fact is that the total knowledge of every human tribe tended to
**accumulate** as the centuries went by. This means later generations had to learn more stuff than early generations. That "stuff" would include relevant abstractions, like names for things. Now recall the Eskimos, famous for having a lot of words to describe different types of snow --do you think early tribespeople would fail to invent names for the many hundreds of types of plants and animals (including bugs) in their tropical environment? LOGICALLY (and eventually), the total amount of stuff a child needed to learn became problematic....
EXCEPT for that first fact mentioned above, about animal adaptability. Under the stress of being inundated with abstractions, the brain adapts by literally growing some extra processing power. It is
**that** extra brainpower that essentially defines the difference between a feral human and a human person.
That's the brainpower that let us invent true language and all the arts roughly 50,000-70,000 years ago; with that brainpower we can
manipulate abstractions like almost no other animal on Earth (except maybe dolphins, which also Nurture their young quite thoroughly).
Humanity basically bootstrapped itself from clever-animal status to personhood status, with its abstraction-manipulating capability,
**accidentally**. And all cultures since have so-routinely inundated their offspring with abstractions that (1) it is very rare for a child to "escape the system" and end up feral, and (2) most folks think that what we consider "normal" human mental development happens automatically, when actually it doesn't. I should point out that the
potential for this extra brainpower (as a consequence of adaptability) has existed for literally megayears; see the stories of
Koko the Gorilla and
Chantek the Orangutan.
