About Nature

Introduction About Nature

We are creatures of our time. What we see and what we overlook, how we think and how we do not are consequences of the circumstances in which we grow up and the ideas we encounter, rather than of our genetically inherited attributes. Whereas the abilities and life-styles of other species are written in their genes (sun-loving plants, for instance, cannot thrive in shade), nurture is ever a stronger force than nature in determining the bent of a person's mind.

There have been three main historical phases in how people have perceived the living world around them. During the first phase, which lasted until the 16^th century in western Europe, people were concerned mostly with how nature affected their lives from day to day. Their anthropocentric world was one of personal experience and practical immediacy; they had no idea that living forms and events varied over large distances or during periods of time far longer than individual human experience.

During the second phase, anthropomorphic attitudes to nature arose as humankind gained a measure of control over environmental vicissitudes. Naturalists of ancient civilizations, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment collected animals and plants and classified them according to their forms and structures. Life was substance rather than process (Chapter 1). In western Europe the comfortable classes of the 16^th century and thereafter greatly enlarged their spatial perspective of nature, as microscopes opened up a new world of diminutive species and international travellers discovered many additional kinds of animals and plants. But nature still lacked a temporal dimension. It had no history.

Then wholesale economic and social changes in western Europe during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries revolutionized the world of ideas and the ways in which naturalists interpreted natural forms and events (Chapter 2). This third phase of how people interpreted nature began when they discovered that the world was far older and that nature had changed over much greater periods of time than had previously been supposed. Lamarck, Cuvier, Erasmus and Charles Darwin, and Charles Lyell arranged natural forms and events in time as well as space. As nature's history came into view, life became process, not substance.

During the 19^th and 20^th centuries, biologists studied the three universal temporal processes of organic development: growth of individual organisms, evolution of species, and secular successions of communities of animals and plants. Naturalists, on the other hand, remained more interested in nature's spatial arrangements, such as species' geographical distributions and favoured habitats, and studied processes such as feeding and breeding only during limited periods of time. Even the relatively short-term tasks of elucidating species' life-cycles require more patience than many naturalists can muster.

During the 19^th century, natural history parted from a recently institutionalized biology based in the laboratory, and by the 20^th century also found itself divorced from the new field-science of ecology (Chapter 3). Meanwhile, professional biology had become dominated by investigation of what happens inside organisms, how it happens, and how it affects organisms' behavioural characteristics (Chapter 4). Observing and describing succession and evolution were and remain more protracted, expensive, and uncertainly rewarding than laboratory-based pursuits such as genetics and immunology.

Biologists and naturalists alike recognize that growth, evolution, and succession share features of energetic performance (Chapter 5), but often confuse material changes during any one of these processes with changes caused by either of the other two. Naturalists may distinguish growth, evolution and succession more accurately in future by studying how organisms, species, and communities change during time as well as in space (Chapter 6).

From the 19^th century to the present day, man's understanding of how nature changes with time has enabled him to interpret nature in a manner much more detached from human needs and values, in less anthropocentric or anthropomorphic ways. People know that humankind has existed only in comparatively recent times, an addendum to rather than the centrepiece of life on Earth, just as the Earth is no longer the centre of the universe, around which stars and other planets revolve. But natural history did not become completely detached from human affairs in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, any more than anthropomorphic interpretations of landscapes and living forms had earlier eradicated anthropocentrism. Modern man is as keen as his forebears were to enhance his well-being by controlling his environment, and proclaim his social status through familiarity with and appreciation of that environment: conserving wildlife, habitats, landscapes, and townscapes; gardening; breeding and keeping pets. These environmental interests all remain more popular than grubbing about in the coun

tryside for economically insignificant wild species. Moreover, just below this anthropomorphic attitude to nature lurks the still more primitive anthropocentrism of the mediaeval mind. Truly does the man of today yet see himselfcentre-stage on a pinnacle of progress at the apex of evolutionary attainment.