Was Dolly the Sheep natural?
OP - March 25, 2009, 02:22 PM
I am really looking to pick some brains here, and just looking for someone to define the word "natural". This is after an ongoing debate and neither of us are getting anywhere with it:
If you've got time, here's the history of the discussion so far:
Me
I agree my definition of nature i.e. "in this context I would start by calling nature a process that is produced without direct intervention by human beings" did not encompass human beings . This is the reason I started it with the premise "in this context", as I assumed you would argue that I saw natural child birth as unnatural. I was relating it to outside of humans as it was simpler to define in context. If you wish to include humans in the definition (which you should but more complicated) then I can't think of one for now - but will when I get more time..
Re. Dolly the Clone, who was born under artificial circumstances, I cannot concur if she was "normal/natural" even after birth even if she did look the same - I confabulate but didn't she die early and had some form of premature arthritis? In any case the process in which she was born was artificial, and hence cannot be construed as part of her natural evolutionary process, although you could form a link with her natural mum (but you accept humans were also active).
You missed my previous question about nuclear holocaust, but I have thought of a more relevant one. Do you see genetically engineered fluorescent green pigs (transgenically modified using jellyfish DNA) as natural?
Him
We seem to be no nearer understanding what is meant by 'natural' except to say its things not involving humans. This is quite an interesting philosophical question for me but i don't think we can answer it here.
Unfortunately we need to answer this to be able to look at your nuclear accident/green pig questions. If we take your view that anything deriving specifically from human intervention is not natural, then of course the answer is that neither of these is natural. But i am not sure we can take that view.
Consider this hypothetical situation; if a dog or dolphin (or other intelligent species) was able to express an opinion on such matters, what would their definition of 'natural' be? Would it mean anything not involving dogs and dolphins? Would they agree with you and pick out humans as the masters of the world and say 'natural' meant something not involving humans? Stupid question i know, but its not a pointless question, why is it that you think we need to single out humans as being the opposite of nature and only every other species' movements on the planet can contribute towards 'nature' but not humans'? I fully realise that your view is probably shared by most people in the world but that doesn't mean its right, just that people have not thought laterally.
Me
I agree with you, natural by definition, cannot prejudice human intervention. We are part of the natural world, in fact part of the ape family. I dodged this whole issue with my definition by referring to the context in question, but now outside of its context can continue to see the difficulty. Are we talking about nature, or natural evolution.
I suppose part of the difference is that when talking about evolution, we are talking about a historical context. Within this frame of reference, all modern day man-made techniques are excluded, so we could just call it everything that happened previously in our historical evolution, this excludes our modern day interventionist techniques.
However looking into the future, I think the definition will change in accordance with your definition. Is the evolution of the grey squirrel (made brought it from Australia to control red squirrel population) seen as an act of nature? In accordance to our evolution, the currently popular "Out of Africa" theory, as opposed to "multi-regional" theory, supposes we walked from Africa and reached Middle East, then Asia, the Indian mixed with Europeans and the Celts were born in the UK, at each stage slowly evolving into a physically different being. This is our natural evolution, and the word nature is attached to it, despite our intervention using boats and different technologies every step of the way.
In reality, I don't think we can make that much difference to the world.
Even if we blow it all up, this can also be seen as a natural part of evolution (we were unable to live in the environment). Then another species will evolve the process will start again, as it did at the end of the Jurassic period, and history will repeat itself.
Him
Here's an interesting philosophical dilemma for you; if we say that 'natural' means things that exclude human involvement, then how would we translate that to other planets that we might encounter? Imagine for example we found a planet on which there lived a species considerably more advanced than ours, something like the 'Borg' on Star Trek and on that planet there also lived humans similar to us, the Borg on the planet would regard the humans as very primitive beings, they would probably allow them to survive only out of lack of motivation to kill them or because they wanted to 'preserve wildlife' ie how we currently feel about many species on this planet. What would we say was 'natural' on that planet, what would the Borg say was 'natural' on that planet? It seems to me there are three possibilities, either:
1) We say that on any given planet only the topmost species is 'not natural' and everything else is living according to nature - difficult to reconcile for example with a second imaginary planet on which only ladybirds and aphids live, do we say that the aphids are natural but not the lady birds because they are dominant and control which aphids live and which die?
2) We take a parochial view that we are humans and therefore all human activity anywhere is not natural, so even on the Borg planet where we are not regarded as the dominant species we still say that humans are not natural and only species below us are natural - or would we also claim that the Borg above us are natural?
3) We pick a specific level of technology and say that anything above that is not natural, so perhaps Neanderthal was natural but as soon as we started using tools we were not natural, or was it when we invented machines or was it when we started to keep other species captive, or was it when we started genetically modifying animals etc etc. The point is that all of these yardsticks are relative, at any given point in time two chums could have been having the conversation that we are having now and they would have concluded that humans are more advanced than they had ever been before and hence this magical point in time where we stopped being natural was some point in the past. But maybe people a million years from now will conclude that actually everything up until we could travel faster than light and mastered time travel was natural (ie us now in 2009) and only stuff after that was contrary to nature - its all relative.
n
me
Coming back to nature, I suppose its definition is a man made concept and hold little scientific value at all. However natural evolution only applies to earth, as presently life does not exist elsewhere, and am comfortable with a different set of laws & definitions applying elsewhere.
However I struggle with your hypothesis that only the top of the pyramid species were excluded - suppose humans continued to evolve into a super-intelligent species, and alongside monkeys, as part of natural evolution, also became as intelligent as modern day humans. If they threw away their bananas, and started genetically mutating rats with horses heads, would these horserats been seen as part of nature or part of the process of natural evolution?
However if a horse somehow managed to fertilise a rat, and a horse rat was produced then it would be natural. The determinant being third party intervention? No, because pollen requires bees to cross polinate.
I dont know. All I do know is that I am uncomfortable with any definitions given thus far.
Topic: Was Dolly the Sheep natural?