HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF (WHAT WE CALL) NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 35

history. The 2011 Pacific Ocean tsunami affected coastal areas of Japan, causing death,
destruction and damage on an epic scale.
4 This 'tethering' of otherwise diverse human customs, preferences and behaviours to
biological universals is a favourite theme of evolutionary psychologists and some neu-
roscientists. Their work has been packaged and popularised by the likes of Sam Harris
(2011) and Peter Corning (2011).
5 In some ways, both the social construction and the social use of the idea of 'reality'
are at least as complex, interesting and consequential as the constitution and use of
the notion of 'nature' and its various collateral concepts - my focus in this topic. The
same might be said of the idea of 'truth', which is intimately connected to the concept
of nature in many contexts of use.
6 This argument is nicely encapsulated in the title of Lewontin's single-authored vol-
ume, published 16 years later, The triple helix: gene, organism and environment (Lewontin,
2000). More recently, it's articulated by neuroscientist Lise Eliot (2009), in her book
Pink brain, blue brain - a refutation of the idea that sex differences in human mental
functionings are, at base, natural and thus largely immune from social conditioning
and engineering. It's a testament to how enduring the idea that 'nature' is, that the
debate about what it means to be human remains so tightly framed by a 'nature-
nurture' dichotomy - witness the American philosopher Jesse Prinz's (2012) book,
tellingly entitled Beyond human nature: how culture and experience shape our lives .
7 References to 'universal nature' can also go beyond the earthly sphere, of course, and
describe our solar system, the galaxy, the cosmos, the so-called Big Bang and so on.
8 In my previous book, Nature ,Iidentified three principal meanings, while others (e.g.
Habgood, 2002) identify several more. There is no consensus on the matter in the
published academic literature. Even so, I'm confident - after some years of reflection
on the matter - that the quartet of meanings I itemise here are the ones most com-
monly used when 'nature' is invoked in discussion. All four do not, of course, usually
come into play at the same time in any given instance of nature being referred to.
9 One recent example of how 'degrees of naturalness' matter relates to environmental
conservation and restoration: there are debates about how 'informed choices' can be
made by conservation professionals about which 'nature' from the past needs protect-
ing or recreating in the present. See, for example, Nigel Dudley's book Authenticity in
nature (Dudley, 2011).
10 The philosopher and historian of ideas Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873-1962), in several of
his philological writings, identified more than sixty meanings of 'nature', variously
differentiated by degree (mostly) and kind (more rarely).
11 Entine argued that, if we accept that many Africans and those with African descen-
dents are susceptible to sickle-cell anaemia (which medical professionals do), then why
not also entertain the idea that their success in competitive sports has a biological
basis? Unsurprisingly, Entine's book proved to be controversial. Some suggested that
it made the science of physiology an accomplice in creating racial differences. Ben
Carrington, for instance, argues that the idea that blacks are 'naturally athletic' is very
much a Euro-North American one that can be dated to the late nineteenth century
when, for the first time, modern nation states had to cope with the pressures of large-
scale immigration and the politics of bringing different cultural and linguistic groups
together in the same territorial space (Carrington, 2010). As Carrington explains, the
idea is - in its origins - racist because it creates a putative biological difference between
people and then seeks to control the life chances of one group at the expense of the
other. In his book Darwin's athletes , John Hoberman (1997) offered a powerful critique
of the sort of 'biological essentialism' found in Entine's book - more's the pity that
Entine ignored it.
12 So-called 'race critical theory', which has been very influential in the Western social
sciences and humanities since the 1960s, takes du Bois's insight as axiomatic. 'Race'
is seen not as a set of natural differences but as a set of efficacious social cate-
gories constructed in terms of supposedly significant biological differences . This said, Lawrence
Hirschfield (1996) has sought to provide an ingenious alternative explanation for