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Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
Ian@Cambio @lemm.ee

What’s the difference between natural and man made?

Just something I was talking about with the wife this evening. She says that our house is not natural and used the phrase “out in nature”. But lots of animals build nests. And are we not animals just doing the same?

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  • I would argue first that humans are a part of nature, not apart from it. So, what we do is, in a sense "natural". Many species of animal modify their environment to make it more to the animals desires. That said, the thing humans do, much better than any other animal we are aware of, is the control and application of energy. Many animals will pick up a rock and use that rock to bash stuff. Some animals may also pick up a rock with a particularly sharp edge or pointy bit and use that edge/point to crack open shells or husks. Hominids (not just modern humans) took that one step further and began preferentially picking out rocks which formed especially sharp or hard points and applying energy to that rock to form useful points. Once early hominids made that discovery, Oldowan tools proliferated in manufacture and use.

    That manufacture and use was the advancement which set hominids apart from other animals. And, hominids also show signs of making choices which require planning ahead in rather abstract ways. To step back for a moment, Oldowan tools could be argued as hominids just following what they say happen "naturally" (without the directed energy usage of the hominid). One rock falls on another rock, and it breaks into a nice, pointy rock. Hominid see, hominid do. And we get hominids banging rocks together to make pointy rocks. But, then it goes further than that. Hominids start planning how to bang rocks together, spending time and more importantly energy, banging on a core to prepare it for a later strike, which will break off a flake with a fairly specific shape. The shaping of later stone tools likely involved the creation of tools (stone and organic) to manufacture the stone tools the hominids planned to use. Hominids at this point were planning multiple steps ahead in the process and expending energy to that goal.

    This is where, I think, the idea of the application of energy really comes in. Consider what an early hominid would have to think about to produce something like an Acheulean tool. First off, they need to select a core, a large rock which may not be somewhere the early hominid would be able to safely sit and work it. So, they have to select a rock and carry it back "home". This takes time and energy which is not being put to direct use in survival. It also exposes the hominid to danger, as carrying a large rock likely took both hands and may have been awkward. Once the hominid gets the rock home, they then sit and spend time and energy dressing the core. Breaking off bits which may not be as useful (waste flakes are a common byproduct of stone tool manufacture). Again, this is time and energy directed at a task which is not immediately useful, but shows planning several steps ahead. Finally, the hominid begins shaping the final flake they plan to remove. At this point, the tool maker must have a good understanding of how the rock is going to fracture. There has been a very deliberate, very well planned application of a lot of energy to get the rock ready for the final strike to break the flake off. All of that energy has been expended to a single goal of making that tool.

    Granted, even this definition of "natural" has a gray area. Beavers direct a lot of energy making dams. But, I'd argue that they do not require the same level of foresight and planning. The "planning" for the damn doesn't rise much above the level of random chance. Beavers use logs and sticks which are already there, with the more advanced action being the cutting of trees for use in the damn. But, they are not going tens of miles to select specific tress, it's more a haphazard, "tree here, tree gets used". Similarly, birds grab twigs and anything else of roughly the right shape to build their nests. And those dams and nests have a pretty direct application to survival. A rock which needs to be shaped before a flake can be broken off has a much less direct application to survival.

    So, it's a bit of as sliding scale, with a lot of things humans do being more "natural" and some things animals do being less "natural". If I grab a fruit and eat it, that's pretty "natural". I'm directing energy to do something directly involved in energy. If I pick a fruit from a tree, put that fruit in a box, put that box in a boat and transport that box to the other side of the planet, so that I can receive a stack of bits of paper, that's a lot less "natural".

  • It depends on the situation, the topic, and even the person; words don't have hard-coded meaning. For example, for me:

    • A substance extracted directly from plants, even cultivated ones, is "natural". One that relies on industrial processes is "man-made".
    • A desire path is "natural", even if caused by human activity. A planned path is "man-made".

    So at the end of the day, perhaps it has to do with planning? At least for me. Man-made things aren't just the result of human activity; they're the goal of said human activity. That may or may not apply to what your wife was talking about, depending on the context of what she said - those nests are not the goal of human activity, unlike your house.

  • Man made (aka human made) is obviously anything made by a human. So let's rather talk about natural vs. artificial.

    Here, the concept probably boils to the idea that humans have a consciousness, and a free will, which are not part of nature, but something special. It's kinda religious.

    But artificial could also have a more generic meaning of something extraneous doing things in an ecosystem, and changing it in completely new ways.

    It's like in a game where the players are controlled by users. The users are not part of the game and can create things that would never come to existence by means of the game's nature, i.e. via procedural world generation or NPC AIs. So e.g. villages in minecraft are natural, but user-built structures are artificial.

    Note though that goods produced by nature are not strictly better than artificially created goods. To name two examples: (1) Carrots harvested from a generated village in minecraft are no different from player-planted carrots. (2) Medicine is not better just because it's extracted from plants.

  • I mean yeah but I've never seen a pigeon blast off the top of a mountain for materials to make concrete.

  • My belief on this is that it is related to the scale of effect we have on the environment we're in. A beaver can be considered a keystone species in it's habitat because it can build a dam and have an outsize effect on other species in it's habitat by changing water movement. Humans are extreme keystone species. Our actions alter ecosystems on a global scale. No other species has such an impact. Therefore I don't think it is fair that we have such an impact on all of the other species on the planet. A beavers dam only affects the forest it is in.

  • I’m also thinking beyond housing. It seems like such an arbitrary distinction to say that things humans make aren’t “natural “ but things that animals make are.

    Not to be too pedantic but aren’t we as humans part of nature? Therefore what we make is a direct natural creation?

    Is it the scale that makes things unnatural? I’ve never seen animal cities, but a single anthill has a higher population density than any city, and it’s 100% not “naturally “ occurring.

  • Nature - by definition, are things found in the physical world that aren’t human creations.

    Modern homes require electricity, clean running water, modern insulation, glass, smoke detectors, town governments oversight, corporate resources, insurance, etc. All of these things are human creations.

    Man-made is similar to hand-made. Both are distinct from machine-made.

    Nature is a bit of a spectrum. Something being handmade is closer to natural than something from a factory. Still, neither are natural.

    • But you see the arbitrary distinction that you’re setting up by differentiating man as separate from nature. I’d argue that humans themselves are “natural” creatures. But every human alive is “man made”

      • I’m not making a philosophical or physiological distinction.

        I’m making a semantic and etymological one.

        Nature, as its defined in the English language, is used to describe things that aren’t human creations.

        Sometimes it’s used to describe things that, even if manipulated by humans, is distinct from an artificial, chemical or industrial process. Like “natural remedies”. Sometimes it’s just a marketing term, “natural flavors” in a soda brand.

        Humans categorically can’t be nature - because we use the word “nature” specifically to distinguish our own creations from the rest of the world.

        A human can choose to live in nature, meaning they’re living in a place that is plurality not man-made. An cabin in an unplanned forest, versus Midtown Manhattan. But even then, the human is the not-nature thing. They’re only surrounded by it.

44 comments