All right, why would we see this correlation?
我们为什么看到这样的一个关联?
Well an idea is that that strategy, that learning strategy, is an extremely powerful, great strategy for getting on in the world, but it has one big disadvantage.
答案是学习的技巧,它非常有用,对成功也很有帮助,但也有它的不利。
And that one big disadvantage is that, until you actually do all that learning, you're going to be helpless.
这个不利便是,在你学会之前,你将无法提供任何帮助。
So you don't want to have the mastodon charging at you and be saying to yourself, "A slingshot or maybe a spear might work. Which would actually be better?"
当一只乳齿象向你冲来的时候,你不会去想,“我到底应该用矛来刺还是用弹弓来射?”
You want to know all that before the mastodons actually show up.
你在乳齿象出现之前,就需要知道应该怎么做。
And the way the evolutions seems to have solved that problem is with a kind of division of labor.
而进化论似乎已经解决了这个问题,通过劳动分工。
So the idea is that we have this early period when we're completely protected. We don't have to do anything.
所以普遍看法是早期的时候我们是被保护着的。我们不需要做任何事。
All we have to do is learn. And then as adults, we can take all those things that we learned when we were babies and children and actually put them to work to do things out there in the world.
只学就够了。但当我们成年后,可以把幼年和童年时学到的东西加以运用,并让这些知识在社会中起到作用。
So one way of thinking about it is that babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species.
第一种解释是,婴儿和小孩子就好比人类的研究和开发部门一样。
So they're the protected blue sky guys who just have to go out and learn and have good ideas, and we're production and marketing.
他们是受保护的人群。只需要寻找和学习新的知识,而我们成年人扮演的是制作和营销的角色。
We have to take all those ideas that we learned when we were children and actually put them to use.
我们需要把所有从孩子那里学到的知识应用到现实生活里。
Another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups,
另一种解释,不把婴儿和小孩子当作是有缺陷的成人,
we should think about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species -- kind of like caterpillars and butterflies --
而是把他们当作是,处于不同的发展时段但是归类于同一种类,就像虫蛹和蝴蝶那样。
except that they're actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we're the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path.
不过他们是比蝴蝶要智慧得多,因为孩子们可以在花园中游走与探索,而我们大人就是虫蛹,在我们狭窄的道路上慢慢地爬行。