Nurturing Evolution: The Family as a Social Womb

In Nurturing Evolution, Richard B. Carter cites several fields of knowledge in order more comprehensively to argue that a human being is specifically a political animal rather than a hostile naked ape which has partially given up its solitary interests to survive in competition with other hostile naked apes. Carter argues that humanness itself is in significant part a result of childhood nurture beginning at birth and that institutions of early nurture comprise ‘social wombs’ i.e., true extensions of those evolutionary processes controlling fetal development within the mother’s womb. Carter further argues that the political creations designed to protect and nourish those ‘social wombs’ are in effect also adjuncts of human evolution. Nurturing Evolution ends by elaborating on the great dissimilarity between morally responsible human adults produced within politically nurtured families and the naked apes envisaged by other schools of political theory.