Babies have no useful skills.
They can't perform any tricks. All they seem able to do is to produce enormous amounts of noise and excrement. An observer might be forgiven for dismissing them, at this stage, as little more than exceptionally maladroit, hairless pets. And then even the most cynical child-hater has to give way, for a moment at least, to a sort of wonder. Many linguists, following the lead of Noam Chomsky, have argued that language is, in effect, hardwired into the brain.