The Evolved Nest, Virtue, and Vice

The evolved nest provides an evolved baseline for optimizing species-normal development. Any shift away from the evolved nest should be considered a risk factor. Humans are dynamic complex systems that self-organize according to experience, and whose initial conditions shape subsequent development and function, barring later intervention. The evolved nest provides the type of stimulation and support at the right times and in the right ways for healthy development. Developmental psychological studies are beginning to examine nest components, demonstrating their effects on social and moral capacities. Neurobiological studies demonstrate the effects of evolved nest components on human functioning and disposition. We can also observe the vast difference in personality and culture between societies that provide the evolved nest and those that do not. Traditional Indigenous communities provide the nest and demonstrate the natural development of virtue. When the nest is not provided it represents a broken continuum of support and we should not be surprised that various psychopathologies result that promote individual vice and vicious societies. Industrialized capitalist societies have fostered people unable to fit into the biocommunity as fellow members and then have rationalized the disordered result with anthropocentric fatalistic theories like selfish-gene theory. The evolved nest is critical for restoring human nature to its earth-centric origins as found among our ancestors for millions of years.

Evolution and the Parenting Ecology of Moral Development

Evolutionary theory can enrich developmental theory but not just any evolutionary theory will do. Evolutionary systems theory is a developmentally friendly evolutionary theory unlike selfish gene theory because it identifies multiple inheritances beyond genes and takes into account the complex dynamism of development. One inheritance is the species-typical evolved nest, or evolved developmental niche, a set of community provisions that evolved to match up with the maturational schedule of the child. Ethogenesis describes the development of ethics across the life span. We can identify two primary moral inheritances that are fostered by the evolved nest. The first is engagement, or flexible relational attunement, which includes capacities for resonance, reciprocity, mutuality, sympathy, and egalitarian relations with face-to-face others. The second emerges with the development abstracting capabilities that build on engagement capacities into an inclusive communal imagination. A species-typical nest provides what babies and young children need to develop a full human nature.

The validity of Dawkins's selfish gene theory and the role of the unconscious in decision making

Although the proposed Selfish Goal Theory constitutes a major theoretical tour de force for addressing the issue of inconsistencies in human actions and the role of motivational goals in behavior, as it is based on an unproven biological paradigm (Dawkins's selfish gene theory) and overemphasizes the role of unconscious processes in decision making, it provides a questionable model of the underlying psychological structure of human agency.