4 ms·
Natural vs artificial is not purely a false dichotomy, because it conveys information. A wolf is nature. A dog is not nature. I don't think either of those cate
by mrob 11y ago
Natural vs artificial is not purely a false dichotomy, because it conveys information. A wolf is nature. A dog is not nature. I don't think either of those categorizations are controversial, even though humans have altered wolf personalities by killing all the bold ones, and even though humans only actively selected a small part of the dog genome, and even though wolves and dogs are genetically very similar. Wolves and dogs are widely accepted as different categories. The existence of marginal cases, eg. dog-wolf hybrids, does not change this any more than the fact that cabbage and kale are the same species makes the words "cabbage" and "kale" meaningless.
You can argue that "nature" is not a useful categorization, and that it's mostly used for political arguments, but the proposed redefinition only makes that problem worse. And it still doesn't solve the problem of marginal cases. All it accomplishes is making the word "nature" more confusing.
- pygy_ 11y agoI use "wild" or "raw", vs artificial to describe such phenomena, even though it is of little practical use. How does the redefinition make anything worse? My take is that, since nature is everything there is, it becomes useless as a concept and can be safely eliminated from the discourse. Its current definition is poisonous.