How many animals does it take to make a human?

Humans are complex creatures. I think that a large part of it is due to our very complex brains that evolved over millions of years ago. With large brains came a lot of concepts later - group living, social nature, tribes, villages, cities, and now humanity on the whole Earth is connected into one single entity.

So we have complex brains and using these complex brains, we created complex structures with rules, ethics, languages, verbal and non-verbal communication modes, body language, cultures, religions, moral codes, it's a lot!

Just think of any mundane interaction between two human beings. Let's say a security guard is checking someone entering an apartment complex during a lazy afternoon. Now you can think of this interaction going down numerous ways based on the identities of the two people, their sexes, ages, cultures, presence of weapons, body type, body language, symbols of wealth, etc. I could go on and on, but hope you get the gist. You can also change the setting of this scene and have dramatically different outcomes. Think of this scene happening in a rich estate in London, in Israel, in a border area between two countries fighting a war, and the amount of tension or number of interactions just explodes.

I see folks around me and some of them have learned how to successfully navigate the complex human society and its myriad interactions. They are quite successful in terms of handling people and situations. I also see a few folks, some very near to me, that have taken just a slightly different path while navigating human relationships and ended up being bitter and cynical. Although the above two categories of people have dramatically different outcomes, my hunch is that there are only a handful of events that actually made these two trajectories so different.

Ancient folk traditions and animal tales had a lot of fascination around the concept of chimeras. A chimera was a mixture of 3-4 different animals. Many cultures have them, so it is not something unusual conjured by a particular group of people or culture only. I think humans are chimeras too, although I am not sure we are animal chimeras. My guess is that the chimeric nature of humans comes from the chimeric nature of our complex brains. Our brains have to process a lot of different streams of information at the same time. Therefore, the output can be very mixed, and it throws people off balance.

Politics, business, relationships, adversity, these are all situations where our ability to process what the other people are thinking, how to get them to do what we want, and marshal our resources to make a particular outcome more probable all come together. That's why I think handling people and relationships is the foundation stone of all success, whether it is personal, interpersonal, or material.