There are only human beings

From The Scientist in the Crib by Alison Gopnik, Andrew M. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl. Page 13

There is still supposed to be a deep split between scientific, cultivated, rational ways of knowing the world and intuitive, natural, emotional ways of knowing. And children (and "primitive" people and women) are still assumed to be the exemplars of intuition rather than science, and passion rather than reason. The debate is still about which side you think you ought to root for.

The new developmental research shows that this historical consensus about children was just plain wrong. Children are not blank tablets or unbridled appetites or even intuitive seers. Babies and young children think, observe, and reason. They consider evidence, draw conclusions, do experiments, solve problems, and search for the truth. Of course, they don't do this in the self-conscious way that scientists do. And the problems they try to solve are everyday problems about what people and objects and words are like, rather than arcane problems about stars and atoms. But even the youngest babies know a great deal about the world and actively work to find out more.

That undermines the entire picture of the great chain of knowing. Women and people from other cultures have, after all, at least escaped the negative implications of being "childlike." (Nowadays it's okay to think women and people from other cultures are intuitive and natural only if you take the positive, Romantic view). But if even children themselves aren't "childlike," the whole picture collapses. There are no savages, noble or otherwise, and there are no "children of nature," not even among children. There are only human beings, children and grown-ups, women and men, hunter-gatherers and scientists, trying to figure out what's going on.