Darcia Narvaez

The biases of WEIRD science need further correction beyond WILD. Specifically, humanity’s million-year-old evolved, species-typical child-raising practices need to be recognized and utilized as baselines for species-normal child-raising practices, limiting the kind of local diversity considered species-typical. Third, considerations of what is considered to be species-normal outcomes should be guided by experiences of species-typical child-raising practices.

A conversation takes place between a therapist academic and a research academic about humanity's million‐years‐old evolved nest, the species‐normal way to raise children and maintain a cooperative human nature. Humanity's evolved nest refers to lifelong practices that have helped our species survive and flourish across generations. Nine components have been studied and associated with child and adult wellbeing. These are common practices in traditional societies all over the world. They include nature immersion and partnership, regular restorative healing, self‐directed social play, warm responsive relationships, positive touch, a welcoming social climate, multiple nurturers and mentors, soothing perinatal experiences and child‐directed breastfeeding. The authors dialogue about how therapy can deploy evolved nest principles.

Early life adversity has been studied widely, but still understudied is the impact of positive early life experiences. Emerging evidence suggests that humanity's millions‐year‐old evolved developmental niche (EDN) supports healthy biopsychosocial development. The EDN includes positive touch, responsive relationships, a welcoming social climate, social embeddedness, and self‐directed free play. We examined the relation between EDN components and cardiac vagal regulation, the online biomarker for psychopathology, health, and a correlate of positive parenting behaviors.Women (N = 78; 84% white/Euro‐American) self‐reported their childhood EDN history, and their respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) was assessed across non‐stimulating and stressful conditions, providing indexes of both cardiac vagal tone and cardiac vagal flexibility. Three latent growth curve models demonstrated that childhood history of social embeddedness and positive home climate outperformed the other EDN components. A higher positive home climate predicted higher cardiac vagal tone, whereas greater social embeddedness predicted vagal flexibility, buffering against stress and supporting faster rates of recovery from stress.EDN‐consistent childhoods, specifically experiencing a positive home climate and social embeddedness, may promote overall cardiac vagal tone and vagal flexibility in women years later. Ecological contexts that support EDN provision may support physiological adaptations that protect against stress and promote stress resilience in adulthood.

With climate havoc, many are realizing that an emphasis on policy and institutional change has been inadequate to foster needed changes. Consequently, activists have determined that something more is needed, specifically psychological transformation. However, discussions of inner development typically focus on adult transformation, overlooking when inner aspects of being are seeded and how they are cultivated in early life. The focus of this article is on how species-normal nurturing in babyhood is essential for fostering the inner capacities needed. The lifeways of egalitarian hunter-gatherers who represent 99% of our genus history show us a different human nature, one with full inner capacities and behaviors to match. We also find a different context for living, deep nestedness, comprised of communal, intergenerational, spiritual, and ecological nestedness. Communal nestedness in the early months and years of life sows healthy inner capacities; when experienced throughout life, it meets basic needs and sustains a cooperative human nature. With intergenerational nestedness, ancestral wisdom is maintained into the future. Spiritual nestedness keeps individuals and communities aligned with universal energies. Ecological nestedness undergirds respectful partnership with local landscapes and nature’s ways. Deep nestedness is humanity’s species-normal pathway for wellness, integrating inner and outer dimensions for responsible, regenerative lifeways. The misdevelopment of human nature that occurs in modernized societies where nurturing has been eroded has contributed to climate havoc. Must we return to hunter-gatherer lifeways to counter climate havoc? No, but we need to understand which aspects of the species-normal lifeway are critical for the restoration of human capacities.

Why is humanity destroying its wellbeing and its habitat, Earth? The suggestion here is that the dominant culture has unnested itself from humanity’s millions-year-old adaptive heritages, impairing evolved capacities and human potential in a feedback loop of greater disconnection and destruction. Humanity’s heritage is to be nested horizontally, respectful of deep history and future generations, nested developmentally with evolved ways of raising children to foster thriving, and nested vertically, consciously participating in Earth-cosmos dynamism. Nestedness fosters capacities that are often missing in westernized peoples: ecological relational consciousness and knowhow, which were central to human adaptation. The dominant culture undermines their development. Mainstream western scholarship has accepted the slippage in baselines, collaborated with industrialized-capitalism culture and its intentional divorce from Nature’s ways, and is now caught and caged in the limitations of its models and metaphors. Enmeshed in the dominant culture, modernist psychology largely ignores species-normal child raising, human nature and capacities found all over the world among nomadic foraging societies and other traditional societies. In order to reverse the dominant culture’s destruction of planetary integrity, biological and cultural diversity, psychology must transform itself to help reestablish evolved practices and support deep nestedness, thereby helping restore human and Earth wellbeing.