The Man-Made Fallacy
Humans, people, you and I, and everyone else we know, love to use the term “man-made” to distinguish the things we make and do from what “nature” makes and does. We consider our homes man-made, our cities with their concrete and steel man-made, and our many trinkets, tools, and items man-made. With this label comes the idea that our products are made in contradiction to nature, that they differ in some inherent way from the products of other organisms, that they are unnatural. Ask someone on the street, and they’d say a beaver’s dam is natural, but a log cabin isn’t; that honey, wax, milk, pearls, and shells are natural, but plastic and carbon fiber, computers and cars, and telescopes and gyroscopes, are not. People believe a divide exists between man and nature: we are us, nature is them, we are unnatural.
But this divide is a fallacy. In truth, nothing that humans do is unnatural, for we are not separate from nature, but a product of nature, just like all other organisms. We’ve come far from our primordial cradle, yes, but we still operate within the terms that nature has written. We play in her sandbox, by her laws of physics, and with the biological abilities she has given us. It’s her game, and we play it the same as every other organism. Nothing we create or do as humans breaks her rules, so it doesn’t make sense to say that we operate beyond or in contradiction to nature. Humans are natural in all that they make and do just as any other organism makes and does.
I can almost hear your objections leaping from your throat:
“But the things we make nature cannot make on her own. Cars, phones, books, materials like plastic—no other organism produces these things, and the conditions to produce them couldn’t arise in nature without humans. Therefore, such materials are man-made and not natural.”
It’s true that these things only come from humans. However, that humans are the only organism capable of producing something doesn’t make it unnatural. Only spiders spin webs, and only honey bees produce honey. We could even say that spiders are the condition for webs, and bees are the condition for honey, for if we removed these insects from nature, we would no longer find webs or honey. Does that make these products unnatural? Of course not. So what makes a bee’s exclusive production of honey natural, but our exclusive production of cars, books, or plastic unnatural? Nothing. Remember, humans fall under nature. We are the natural condition for the products we make.
“Okay, but we go beyond nature to make our products because we use more than what nature strictly gives us. Nature gives spiders exactly what they need to spin webs, bees what they need to make honey, and beavers what they need to make dams. Making plastic and other man-made products, however, requires special tools that we make ourselves. This makes these products unnatural.”
It seems like “tools” are different from the end products we make with them, but they aren’t. Tools are simply products that help us make other products. And any product we make, regardless of its purpose or complexity, comes from one feature that nature gave to us: our intelligence. Humans might make products from other products, but we can only do so because nature gave us the brains to comprehend such a feat. All that we make stems from a biological feature that nature gave us, just like the spider and the bee and the beaver.
“But the human brain and its intelligence is exactly what goes beyond nature, because it goes beyond instinct, and uses knowledge to do what it does. A spider doesn’t learn how to make silk and spin webs, nor can it transmit those instincts—nature implanted those instincts in it. The same applies to bees and beavers. They come ready-made with the instincts to make what they do. This makes their products natural. Humans, on the other hand, break from nature in how they use knowledge to do things other than what nature explicitly allowed. That humans use knowledge goes beyond nature and makes our products unnatural.”
It’s true that humans are the only organisms that create knowledge, as far as we can tell. But are we the only organisms that use knowledge? No, we aren’t. Every organism uses knowledge, because genes contain knowledge.
To understand this we must ask: what is knowledge? It isn’t just what we, as humans, figure out and write down. Knowledge is any information that, if followed, leads to a specific arrangement of matter. The knowledge of how to build a computer, for instance, contains the exact steps, processes, and transformations required to take raw earth and rearrange it into a functioning computer, from the aluminum in its body to the silicon in its chips. It seems information like this could only live in the human mind, encoded in human language, but that’s not the case. Information can live anywhere in which we can make a distinction, with binary being the simplest. And if information can live in a system, so can knowledge.
Genes encode information through sequences of nucleotides (adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine). These gene sequences give all organisms, even us, the instincts to “do what they do”, a large part of which involves arranging matter into specific forms, like silk, honey, and dams. And if genes contain information which tells organisms how to make specific arrangements of matter, then we can say genes contain knowledge. And indeed, this is true. If you had enough ink and paper, you could write out a creature’s genetic code and, if you had the wit, you could decipher the knowledge it contains just like human language. Information is information. Knowledge is knowledge.
All organisms use knowledge. The only difference is that other organisms have their knowledge encoded into their genes through evolution, while we create the majority of our’s through science, and transmit it through language.
But does our ability to create and transmit knowledge make us unnatural? No, it doesn’t, for nature has, once again, given us this set of abilities through our brains, vocal chords, and dexterous hands. We can trace all of it back to our biology, back to what nature has endowed us with, back to the terms she has written. We are special, but we are not unnatural.
“But how can humans be a part of nature when our activities destroy nature? Everywhere we go we must displace whatever else was there to make room for ourselves. We consume too much and throw nature out of balance. Humans and nature mix like oil and water.”
It’s true that we do take from the environments we live in. We devour forests. We empty oceans. We upturn the Earth for metals and minerals. But so do all other organisms. We cannot look in nature and find a blameless organism—one that doesn’t consume energy and change its environment as a result—because none can escape thermodynamics. All organisms must take to survive.
Why is it natural when a beaver downs a tree to make its dam, but unnatural deforestation when humans do the same to make houses? The beaver displaces some organism, perhaps a squirrel, a bird, a bug, not to mention the tree itself, when it gathers wood. The beaver alters the habitat of fish and frogs and salamanders, most likely to their detriment, when it severs a river. This line of thinking applies to all organisms. Even a caterpillar’s cocoon comes at the cost of a plant’s energy.
The only difference between the change we enact and that of other organisms is the scale: we greatly outnumber other organisms and produce more products, and therefore use more resources.
But this difference doesn’t make our activities unnatural. If any organism proliferated as us they’d have similar impacts on their environments. And just because we have exceptional intelligence that allows us to be exceptional creators doesn’t put us outside of nature. Many other organisms have exceptional abilities that nature gave them, abilities which dwarf ours. A peregrine falcon is the fastest organism when it dives through the sky by a wide margin. A dog’s nose is six orders of magnitude more sensitive than ours. A caterpillar sleeps for a time and emerges with wings. We can only dream of doing such things, just as they can only dream of thinking like us. Do these organisms also go beyond nature because they have exceptional abilities?
The outsized impact that humans have on their environments makes it seem like we stand in opposition to nature, but in truth we do just what she allows, for she made us, and we are but an extension of her. We are nature. Nature is all. We are natural.