This post is going to get a little more deep into the philosophical and semantic side of things. I will be explaining how "natural", and therefore also "synthetic", are effectively useless adjectives because there is always a more descriptive one.In normal conversation people bring up the word "natural" frequently, usually considering it a good trait that it was made by nature rather than by man. On the other side of the coin "unnatural" or "synthetic" is often used to describe things that are bad for you or not morally right. I find this distinction of natural being positive and unnatural being negative to be logically unsound on top of both descriptors largely failing to describe any traits about the object in question. The definition of natural is "existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind", while synthetic is defined as "noting or pertaining to compounds formed through a chemical process by human agency, as opposed to those of natural origin". These two adjectives are clearly opposites with the definition of each specifically mentioning "not the other". What does claiming that something is natural actually tell us about the object though? There are no distinct properties that only come from natural products and vice versa. Natural is often used to describe things that are healthier for human consumption but this is also obviously not universal. There are plenty of natural things that would kill you very quickly if you consumed them (like poison, bacteria, or viruses) and there are quite a few synthetic things that offer a lot of benefits through consumption (medicine for example). On top of being meaningless adjectives I find it can also be rather difficult to distinguish between the two in some cases, making them even more useless. As many people are aware dogs can trace their lineage back to wild wolves before humans domesticated them and bred them to have desirable traits as our pets. We selectively let dogs who had the traits we wanted breed to make sure that we got the best hunting, guard, cute, friendly, and/or playful dogs. We did the same thing with corn, just take a look at how drastically corn has changed through human intervention. Before humans corn kernels looked a lot like the tiny one pictured to the far left. However, even given these drastic changes largely due to human interference with the reproduction of these species people still consider dogs and corn natural (at least corn that isn't a GMO, but that's a whole different beast for another post). Clearly dogs and corn would not exist as they do today if humans hadn't artificially selected for certain traits so why don't we consider them man-made? Additionally, now they can grow, live, and reproduce largely without human interaction like a lot of other "natural" organisms so what traits exist in corn and dogs that distinguish them as such aside from their history?
On that note I have another hypothetical situation that blurs the line between natural and synthetic. Lets say we are a decade or so in the future and we have now mastered the creation of genomes and can make organisms from scratch. To prove a point we take some typical run of the mill grass, copy its DNA, and make an exact replica of it with our Genuine Genome Generator (patent pending). This grass was clearly made by people, we just watched ourselves do it. But, if I took the original and mixed it around with the new one it would be impossible to distinguish the difference. So what does calling the original organism natural and the manufactured one synthetic describe in this case? only its method of creation, every other trait is identical, none of its actual properties. So if we can have two identical objects, one of which being natural and one synthetic, then clearly they are not very useful descriptors. In rebuttal of this last point I have heard that there are cases where synthetic or natural implies certain properties. For example, synthetic oil used in cars has very different properties than natural oil. Thusly people often simply refer to it in short hand as synthetic oil because of the large difference in properties. In this case it seems like synthetic is being useful, but I disagree. Synthetic is merely a more general placeholder for something like 5W-30 (the temperatures that the oil is designed for), there are still much more descriptive adjectives to use. So in conclusion: natural and synthetic don't describe any actual properties of things and can in fact both describe objects that are otherwise identical making them useless adjectives. Try to remember this in future conversations when attempting to describe something. It is interesting, however, to think about how we consider the things we made to be of a different nature than those made by nature itself, even given that all humans occurred naturally from nature as well. If we are natural why are our creations not such as well?
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NicI'll write about science, philosophy, shows and video games. The first two frequently in regards to the latter two. Archives
March 2016
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