Nature
Nature, in
the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural, physical, or material world or universe. Nature refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to
in general. It ranges in scale from the to the cosmic.
The
word nature is derived from the word natural or essential
qualities, innate disposition, and in ancient times, literally meant birth. Natural was a Latin translation of the Greek word, which
originally related to the intrinsic characteristics that plants, animals, and
other features of the world develop of their own accord. The concept of nature
as a whole, the physical, is one of several expansions of the original notion,
it began with certain core applications of the word by philosophers, and has
steadily gained currency ever since. This usage was confirmed during the advent
of modern in the last several centuries.
Within
the various uses of the word today, nature
often refers to and. Nature may refer to the general realm of various types of
living plants and animals, and in some cases to the processes associated with
inanimate objects the way that particular types of things exist and change of
their own accord, such as the end of the Earth, and the land of which all these
things are composed. It is often taken to mean the orwild animals, rocks, forest, beaches, and in general those things that
have not been substantially altered by human intervention, or which persist
despite human intervention. For example, manufactured objects and human
interaction generally are not considered part of nature, unless qualified as,
for example, human nature or the whole of nature. This more
traditional concept of natural things which can still be found today implies a
distinction between the natural and the artificial, with the artificial being understood
as that which has been brought into being by a human or a human. Depending on
the particular context, the term natural
might also be distinguished from the unnatural, the supernatural, or synthetic.
Nature is an essay written by, published by
James Munroe and Company in 1836. It is in this essay that the foundation of is
put forth, a belief system that espouses a non traditional appreciation of
nature. Transcendentalism suggests that divinity suffuses all nature, and
speaks to the notion that we can only understand reality through studying
nature. A visit to the in Paris inspired a set of lectures delivered in Boston
and subsequently the ideas leading to the publication of Nature.
Within this essay, Emerson divides nature into
four usages, Commodity, Beauty, Language and Discipline. These distinctions
define the ways by which humans use nature for their basic needs, their desire
for delight, their communication with one another and their understanding of
the world.
Hendry David
Thoreau had read Nature as a
senior at and took it to heart. It eventually became an essential influence for
Thoreau's later writings, including his seminal. In fact, Thoreau wrote Walden
while living in a self built cabin on land that Emerson owned. Their
longstanding acquaintance offered Thoreau great encouragement in pursuing his
desire to be a published author.
Emerson followed the success of this essay with a
famous speech entitled. These two works laid the foundation for both his new
philosophy and his literary career.
Earth
Earth
is the only presently known to support life, and its natural features are the
subject of many fields of scientific research. Within the solar system, it is
third closest to the sun, it is the largest and the fifth largest overall. Its
most prominent climatic features are its two large polar regions, two
relatively narrow zones, and a wide equatorial tropical to subtropical region. Precipitation
varies widely with location, from several metres of water per year to less than
a millimeter. 71 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by salt-water
oceans. The remainder consists of continents and islands, with most of the
inhabited land in the Northern Hemisphere.
Earth
has evolved through geological and biological processes that have left traces
of the original conditions. The is divided into several gradually migrating.
The interior remains active, with a thick layer of plastic and an iron filled
core that generates a magnetic field.
The
conditions have been significantly altered from the original conditions by the
presence of life forms, which create an ecological balance that stabilizes the
surface conditions. Despite the wide regional variations in climate by and
other geographic factors, the long term average global climate is quite stable
during interglacial periods, and variations of a degree or two of average
global temperature have historically had major effects on the ecological
balance, and on the actual geography of the Earth.
Geology
Geology
is the science and study of the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the.
The field of geology encompasses the study of the composition, dynamics, and of, and the processes by which
they are formed, moved, and changed. The field is a major, and is also
important for and extraction, knowledge about and mitigation of, some fields,
and understanding and environments.
Geological
evolution
The geology of
an area evolves through time as rock units are deposited and inserted and
deformational processes change their shapes and locations.
Rock
units are first emplaced either by deposition onto the surface or intrude into
the overlying rock. Deposition can occur when settle onto the surface of the
Earth and later lithely into sedimentary rock, or when as volcanic material such
as volcanic ash or lava flows or flows, blanket the surface. Igneous intrusions
such as batholiths, laccoliths, dikes, and sills, push upwards into the
overlying rock, and crystallize as they intrude.
After
the initial sequence of rocks has been deposited, the rock units can be
deformed and or metamorphosed. Deformation typically occurs as a result of
horizontal shortening, Horizontal extension, or side to side motion. These structural
regimes broadly relate to convergent boundaries, divergent boundaries, and
transform boundaries, respectively, between tectonic plates.
Historical perspective
Earth
is estimated to have formed 4.54 billion years ago from the solar nebula,
along with the sun and other plants. The moon formed roughly 20 million
years later. Initially molten, the outer layer of the planet cooled, resulting
in the solid crust. Outguessing and volcanic activity produced the primordial
atmosphere. Condensing water vapor, most or all of which came from ice
delivered by comets, produced the oceans and other water sources. The highly
energetic chemistry is believed to have produced a self-replicating molecule
around 4 billion years ago.
Continents
formed, then broke up and reformed as the surface of Earth reshaped over
hundreds of millions of years, occasionally combining to make a supercontinent.
Roughly 750 million years ago, the earliest known supercontinent. Roughly
750 million years ago, the earliest known supercontinent Rodinia, began to
break apart. The continents later recombined to form Pannotia which broke apart
about 540 million years ago, then finally Pangaea, which broke apart about 180
million years ago.
There
is significant evidence that a severe action during the era covered much of the
planet in a sheet of ice. This hypothesis has been termed the, and it is of
particular interest as it proceeds the in which multicellular life forms began
to proliferate about 530–540 million years ago.
Since the Cambrian explosion there have been five
distinctly identifiable. The last mass extinction occurred some 66 million
years ago, when a meteorite collision probably triggered the extinction of the
and other large reptiles, but spared small animals such as, which then
resembled. Over the past 66 million years, mammalian life diversified.
Several million years ago, a species of small
African gained the ability to stand upright. The subsequent advent of human
life, and the development of agriculture and further allowed humans to affect
the Earth more rapidly than any previous life form, affecting both the nature
and quantity of other organisms as well as global climate. By comparison, the,
produced by the proliferation of during the period, required about
300 million years to culminate.
Atmosphere, climate, and
weather
The atmosphere of the Earth serves as a key
factor in sustaining the planetary. The thin layer of that envelops the Earth
is held in place by the planet's gravity. Consists of 78%, 1% and other, carbon
dioxide, etc.; but air also contains a variable amount of water vapor. The
atmospheric pressure declines steadily with altitude, and has of about 8 kilometers at the Earth's surface: the height at which the atmospheric pressure
has declined by a factor of. The of the Earth's atmosphere plays an important
role in depleting the amount of radiation that reaches the surface. As is
readily damaged by UV light, this serves to protect life at the surface. The
atmosphere also retains heat during the night, thereby reducing the daily
temperature extremes.
Terrestrial weather occurs almost exclusively in
the, and serves as a convective system for redistributing heat. Oceans current
are another important factor in determining climate, particularly the major
underwater which distributes heat energy from the equatorial oceans to the
Polar Regions. These currents help to moderate the differences in between
winter and summer in the temperate zones. Also, without the redistributions of
heat energy by the ocean currents and atmosphere, the tropics would be much
hotter, and the much colder.
Weather can have both beneficial and harmful
effects. Extremes in weather, such as or and, can expend large amounts of
energy along their paths, and produce devastation. Surface vegetation has
evolved a dependence on the seasonal variation of the weather, and sudden
changes lasting only a few years can have a dramatic effect, both on the
vegetation and on the animals which depend on its growth for their food.
The planetary climate is a measure of the long term
trends in the weather. Various factors are known to, including ocean currents,
surface, variations in the solar luminosity, and changes to the planet's orbit.
Based on historical records, the Earth is known to have undergone drastic
climate changes in the past, including.
The climate of a region depends on a number of
factors, especially. A latitudinal band of the surface with similar climatic
attributes forms a climate region. There are a number of such regions, ranging
from the at the equator to the in the northern and southern extremes. Weather
is also influenced by the, which result from the being relative to its. Thus,
at any given time during the summer or winter, one part of the planet is more
directly exposed to the rays of the. This exposure alternates as the Earth
revolves in its orbit. At any given time, regardless of season, the and
hemispheres experience opposite seasons.
Weather is that is readily modified by small
changes to the, so accurate is currently limited to only a few days. Overall,
two things are currently happening worldwide temperature is increasing on the average,
and regional climates have been undergoing noticeable changes.
Water on Earth
Water is a chemical substance that is
composed of hydrogen and oxygen and is vital for all known forms of life. In
typical usage, water refers
only to its liquid form or state, but the substance also has a solid state, and
a state, ice, and a gaseous state, water vapor or state, but the substance also
has a solid state. Water covers 71% of the surface. On Earth, it is found
mostly in oceans and other large water bodies, with 1.6% of water below ground
in and 0.001% in the as, and. hold 97% of surface water, and
polar 2.4%, and other land surface water
such as and 0.6%. Additionally, a minute
amount of the Earth's water is contained within biological bodies and
manufactured products.
Oceans
An
is a major body of, and a principal component of the hydrosphere. Approximately
71% of the Earth's is covered by ocean,
a that is customarily divided into
several principal oceans and smaller. More than half of this area is over 3,000
meters (9,800 feet) deep. Average oceanic is around 35, 3.5%, and nearly all
seawater has salinity in the range of 30 to 38 ppt. Though generally recognized
as several separate oceans, these waters comprise one global, interconnected
body of salt water often referred to as the or global ocean. This concept of a
global ocean as a continuous body of water with relatively free interchange
among its parts is of fundamental importance to oceanography.
The
major oceanic divisions are defined in part by the continents, various
archipelagos, and other criteria, these divisions are in the Pacific Ocean, the
Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean and the Arctic Ocean.
Smaller regions of the oceans are called seas, gulfs, babys and other names.
There are also salt lakes, which are smaller bodies of landlocked saltwater
that are not interconnected with the World Ocean. Two notable examples of salt
lakes are the Aral Sea and the Great Salt Lake.
Lakes
A
lake is a terrain feature, a body of liquid on the surface of a world that is
localized to the bottom of basin and moves slowly if it moves at all. On Earth,
a body of water is considered a lake when it is inland, not part of the, is
larger and deeper than a, and is fed by a river. The only world other than
Earth known to harbor lakes is, Saturn largest moon, which has lakes of, most
likely mixed with. It is not known if Titan's lakes are fed by rivers, though
Titan surface is carved by numerous river beds. Natural lakes on Earth are
generally found in mountainous areas and areas with ongoing or recent. Other
lakes are found in or along the courses of mature rivers. In some parts of the
world, there are many lakes because of chaotic drainage patterns left over from
the last. All lakes are temporary over geologic time scales, as they will
slowly fill in with sediments or spill out of the basin containing them.
Ponds
A
pond is body of standing water, either natural or man-made, that is
usually smaller than a. A wide variety of man-made bodies of water are classified
as ponds, including designed for
aesthetic ornamentation, designed for commercial fish breeding, and designed to
store thermal energy. Ponds and lakes are distinguished from streams via speed.
While currents in streams are easily observed, ponds and lakes possess
thermally driven micro currents and moderate wind driven currents. These
features distinguish a pond from many other aquatic terrain features, such as
and tide pools.
Rivers
A
river is a natural, usually, flowing toward an ocean, a like, a sea or another
river. In a few cases, a river simply flows into the ground or dries up
completely before reaching another body of water. Small rivers may also be
called by several other names, including, creek, brook, rivulet, and rill,
there is no general rule that defines what can be called a river. Many names
for small rivers are specific to geographic location, one example is Burn in Scotland and North east
England. Sometimes a river is said to be larger than a creek, but this is not
always the case, due to vagueness in the language. A river is part of the
hydrological cycle . Water within a river is generally collected from through,
recharge, and the release of stored water in natural ice and snowpacks.
Streams
A
stream is a flowing body of water with a current, confined within a bed and
stream banks. In the united states a stream is classified as a watercourse less
than 60 feet wide. Streams are important
as conduits in the water cycle, instruments in groundwater recharge, and they
serve as corridors for fish and wildlife migration. The biological habit in the
immediate vicinity of a stream is called a riparian zone. Given the status of
the ongoing Holocene extinction, streams play an important corridor role in
connecting fragmented habitats and thus in conserving biodiversity. The study
of streams and waterways in general involves many branches of
inter-disciplinary natural science and engineering, including hydrology,
fluvial geomorphology, aquatic ecology, fish biology, riparian ecology and others.
Ecosystems
Ecosystems
are composed of a variety of and components that function in an interrelated
way. The structure and composition is determined by various environmental
factors that are interrelated. Variations of these factors will initiate
dynamic modifications to the ecosystem. Some of the more important components
are atmosphere, radiation from the, water, and living organisms.
Central
to the ecosystem concept is the idea that interacts with every other element in
their local. Eugene Odom, a founder of ecology, stated any unit that includes
all of the organisms in a given area interacting with the physical environment
so that a flow of energy leads to clearly defined tropic structure, biotic
diversity, and material cycles within the system is an ecosystem Within the
ecosystem, species are connected and dependent upon one another in the, and
exchange and between themselves as well as with their environment. The human
ecosystem concept is grounded in the deconstruction of the human nature and the
premise that all species are ecologically integrated with each other, as well
as with the abiotic constituents of their biotope.
A
smaller unit of size is called a micro ecosystem. For example, Micro ecosystems
can be a stone and all the life under it. A macro ecosystem might involve a whole ecoregion, with its
drainage basin.
Wilderness
Wilderness
is generally defined as areas that have not been significantly modified by
activity. The wild foundation goes into
more detail, defining wilderness as, the most intact, undisturbed wild natural
areas left on our planet those last truly wild places that humans do not
control and have not developed with roads, pipelines or other industrial
infrastructure. Wilderness areas can be found in preserves, estates, farms,
conservation preserves, ranches, national forests, national parks and even in
along rivers, gulches or otherwise undeveloped areas. Wilderness areas and protected
are considered important for the survival of certain, ecological studies,
solitude, and. Some nature writers believe wilderness areas are vital for the
human spirit and creativity, and some consider wilderness areas to be an
integral part of the planet's self-sustaining natural. They may also preserve historic
traits and that they provide for wild and that may be difficult to recreate in
Zoos, arboretums or laboratories.
Human interrelationship
Although humans currently comprise only a
minuscule proportion of the total living biomass on Earth, the human effect on
nature is disproportionately large. Because of the extent of human influence,
the boundaries between what humans regard as nature and made environments is
not clear cut except at the extremes. Even at the extremes, the amount of
natural environment that is free of discernible human influence is presently
diminishing at an increasingly rapid pace.
The development of technology by the human race
has allowed the greater exploitation of natural resources and has helped to
alleviate some of the risk from natural hazards. In spite of this progress,
however, the fate of human remains closely linked to changes in the
environment. There exists a highly complex feedback loop between the use of
advanced technology and changes to the environment that are only slowly
becoming understood. Man made threats to the Earth natural environment include,
and disasters such as oil spills. Humans have contributed to the of many plants
and animals.
Humans employ nature for both leisure and
economic activities. The acquisitions of natural resources for industrial use
remains the primary component of the world’s economic system some activities,
such as and, are used for both sustenance and leisure, often by different
people. Was first adopted around the 9th millennium BCE. Ranging
from food production to, nature influences economic wealth.
Although early humans gathered uncultivated plant
materials for food and employed the medicinal properties of vegetation for
healing, most modern human use of plants is through agriculture. The clearance
of large tracts of land for crop growth has led to a significant reduction in
the amount available of forestation and wetlands, resulting in the loss of
habitat for many plant and animal species as well as increased erosion.
Beyond
Earth
Outer space, also simply called space, refers to the relatively empty
regions of the universe outside the atmospheres of celestial bodies. Outer space is used to distinguish it
from. There is no discrete boundary between them and space, as the atmosphere
gradually attenuates with increasing altitude. Outer space within the is
called, which passes over into at what is known as the heliopause.
Outer space is sparsely filled with several dozen
types of discovered to date by, left over from the and the origin of the
universe, and, which and various. There is also some gas, and, and small.
Additionally, there are signs of human life in outer space today, such as
material left over from previous manned and unmanned launches which are a
potential hazard to spacecraft. Some of this re enters the atmosphere
periodically.
Although the planet Earth is currently the only
known body within the solar system to support life, current evidence suggests
that in the distant past the planet possessed bodies of liquid water on the
surface. For a brief period in Mars history, it may have also been capable of
forming life. At present though, most of the water remaining on Mars is frozen.
If life exists at all on Mars, it is most likely to be located underground
where liquid water can still exist.
Conditions on the other terrestrial planets, and,
appear to be too harsh to support life as we know it but it has been
conjectured that, the fourth largest moon of, may possess a sub surface ocean
of liquid water and could potentially host life.
Nowadays, astronomers started to discover extra
solar planets that lie in the of space surrounding a, and therefore could
possibly host life as we know it.
Nature is a prominent
interdisciplinary scientific journal . It was first published on 4 November
1869. It was ranked the worlds most cited by the Science Edition of the
2010 and is widely regarded as one of
the few remaining academic journals that publish original research across a
wide range of scientific fields.
Research scientists are the primary audience for
the journal, but summaries and accompanying articles are intended to make many
of the most important papers understandable to scientists in other fields and
the educated general public. Towards the front of each issue are, news and
feature articles on issues of general interest to scientists, including current
affairs, science funding, business, scientific ethics and research
breakthroughs. There are also sections on books and arts. The remainder of the
journal consists mostly of research papers, which are often dense and highly technical.
Because of strict limits on the length of papers, often the printed text is
actually a summary of the work in question with many details relegated to
accompanying supplementary material.
There are many fields of in which important new
advances and original research are published as either articles or letters in Nature. The papers that have
been published in this journal are internationally acclaimed for maintaining
high research standards.
Prior to Nature
The enormous progress in science and mathematics
during the 19th century was recorded in journals written mostly in German or
French, as well as in English. Britain underwent enormous technological and
industrial changes and advances particularly in the latter half of the 19th
century. In English the most respected scientific journals of this time were
the refereed journals of the, which had published many of the great works from,
through to early works from. In addition, during this period, the number of
popular science periodicals doubled from the 1850s to the 1860s. According to
the editors of these popular science magazines, the publications were designed
to serve as organs of science, in
essence, a means of connecting the public to the scientific world.
Nature, first created in 1869,
was not the first magazine of its kind in Britain. One journal to precede Nature was which, created in 1859,
began as a magazine and progressed to include more physical observational
science and technical subjects and less natural history. The journal name
changed from its original title to Intellectual
Observer, A Review of Natural History, Microscopic Research, and
Recreative Science and then later to the Student and Intellectual Observer of Science, Literature, and Art.
While Recreative Science had
attempted to include more physical sciences such as and, the Intellectual Observer broadened
itself further to include literature and art as well. Similar to Recreative Science was the scientific
journal, created in 1862, which covered different fields of science by creating
subsections titled Scientific Summary or Quarterly Retrospect, with book
reviews and commentary on the latest scientific works and publications. Two
other journals produced in England prior to the development of nature were the, established in 1864
and 1868, respectively. The journal most closely related to nature in its editorship and format
was The Reader, created in
1864, the publication mixed science with literature and art in an attempt to
reach an audience outside of the scientific community, similar to popular
science review.
These
similar journals all ultimately failed. The Popular Science Review was the longest to survive,
lasting 20 years and ending its publication in 1881; Recreative Science ceased publication as the Student and Intellectual Observer in
1871. The Quarterly Journal,
after undergoing a number of editorial changes, ceased publication in 1885.
Creation of Nature
Not
long after the conclusion of The
Reader, a former editor, decided to create a new scientific journal
titled Nature, taking its name
from a line by to the solid ground of nature trusts the Mind that builds for
aye. First owned and published by, Nature
was similar to its predecessors in its attempt to provide cultivated readers
with an accessible forum for reading about advances in scientific knowledge. Janet
Browne has proposed that far more than any other science journal of the period,
Nature was conceived, born, and
raised to serve polemic purpose. Many of the early editions of Nature consisted of articles written
by members of a group that called itself the, a group of scientists known for
having liberal, progressive, and somewhat controversial scientific beliefs
relative to the time period. Initiated by, the group consisted of such
important scientists as, along with another five scientists and mathematicians,
these scientists were all avid supporters of Darwin theory of evolution as, a theory
which, during the latter half of the 19th century, received a great deal of
criticism among more conservative groups of scientists. Perhaps it was in part
its scientific liberality that made Nature
a longer-lasting success than its predecessors. Editor of Nature from 1966 to 1973 as well as
from 1980 to 1995 suggested at a celebratory dinner for the journal centennial
edition that perhaps it was the journalistic qualities of Nature that drew
readers in, journalism Maddox states, is a way of creating a sense of community
among people who would otherwise be isolated from each other. This is what
Lockyer journal did from the start. In addition, Maddox mentions that the
financial backing of the journal in its first years by the Macmillan family
also allowed the journal to flourish and develop more freely than scientific
journals before it.
Expansion and development
In
1970, Nature first opened its Washington office, other branches opened
in New York in 1985, Tokyo and Munich in 1987, Paris in 1989, San Francisco in
2001, Boston in 2004, and Hong Kong in 2005. Starting in the 1980s, the journal
underwent a great deal of expansion, launching over ten new journals. These new
journals comprise the Nature Publishing Group, which was created in 1999 and
includes Nature, Nature
Research Journals, Stockton Press Specialist Journals and Macmillan Reference.
In
1997, Nature created its own
website and in 1999 Nature Publishing Group began its series of Nature Reviews. Some articles
and papers are available for free on the Nature web site. Others require the
purchase of premium access to the site.
Nature
claims a readership of about 424,000 total readers. The journal has a
circulation of around 53,000 but studies have concluded that on average a
single copy is shared by as many as 8 people.
Science fiction
In
1999 Nature began publishing science fiction short stories. The brief
are printed in a series called Futures.
The stories appeared in 1999 and 2000, again in 2005 and 2006, and have
appeared weekly since July 2007. Sister publication also printed stories in
2007 and 2008 in 2005, Nature
was awarded the Best Publisher award for the Futures series. One hundred of the Nature stories between 1999 and 2006 were published as the
collection Futures from Nature
in 2008.
Landmark papers
Many
of the most significant scientific breakthroughs in modern history have been
first published in Nature. The
following is a selection of scientific breakthroughs published in Nature, all of which had far reaching
consequences, and the citation for the article in which they were published.
Publishing of articles
Having a paper published in Nature or any Nature publication such as Nature chemistry or Nature
chemical biology is very prestigious, and the papers are often
highly cited, which can lead to promotions, grant funding, and attention from
the mainstream media. Because of these effects, competition among scientists to
publish in high level journals like Nature and its closest competitor
can be very fierce. Nature, a
measure of how many citations a journal generates in other works, was 36.280 in
2011, among the highest of any science journal.
As with most other professional scientific
journals, papers undergo an initial screening by the editor, followed by in
which other scientists, chosen by the editor for expertise with the subject
matter but who have no connection to the research under review, will read and
critique articles, before publication. In the case of Nature, they are only sent for review if it is decided that they
deal with a topical subject and are sufficiently ground breaking in that
particular field. As a consequence, the majority of submitted papers are rejected
without review.
Nature Medicine
Nature
Medicine is a monthly peer reviewed
medical publishing research articles, reviews, news and commentaries in the
biomedical area, including both basic research and early-phase clinical
research covering all aspects of medicine. The journal seeks to publish
research papers that demonstrate novel insight into disease processes, with
direct evidence of the physiological relevance of the results.
The
journal was established in 1995 and is published by the nature publishing group.
As with other Nature journals,
there is no external, with editorial decisions being made by an in house team,
although by external expert referees forms a part of the review process.
Nature Materials
Nature Materials
is a peer reviewed scientific journal published by nature publishing group. It
was launched in September 2002. Vincent Dusastre is the launching and current
chief editor. A natural material
is any product or physical matter that comes from plants, animals, or the
ground. Minerals and the metals that can be extracted from them are also
considered to belong into this category. Natural materials are also often used
in textiles.
Aims and scope
Nature Materials
is focused on all topics within the combined disciplines of and. Topics published
in the journal are presented from the view of the impact that materials
research has on other scientific disciplines such as, and. Coverage in this journal encompasses and
applications from synthesis to processing, and from structure to composition.
Coverage also includes and applications of properties and performance of
materials. Materials are specifically described as substances in the, and which
are designed or manipulated for ends.
Furthermore,
Nature Materials functions as a
forum for the community. Research results are published, obtained from across
all areas of materials research, and between scientists involved in the
different disciplines. The readership for this journal is scientists, in both
and industry involved in either developing materials or working with materials related
concepts. Finally, Nature Materials
perceives materials research as significantly influential on the development of
society.
In the blood
The
latest study, which is published today in Nature Medicine, was led by neurologist Howard Federoff of
Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC. He and his colleagues
tested the participants cognitive and memory skills, and took blood samples
from them, around once a year for five years. They used mass spectrometry to
analyse the blood plasma of 53 participants with mild cognitive impairment or
Alzheimer’s disease, including 18 who developed symptoms during the study, and
53 who remained cognitively healthy. They found ten phospholipids that were
present at consistently lower levels in the blood of most people who had, or
went on to develop, cognitive impairment. The team validated the results in a
set of 41 further participants.
We don’t
really know the source of the ten molecules, though we know they are generally
present in cell membranes, says Federoff. But he proposes that concentrations
of the phospholipids might somehow reflect the breakdown of neural cell
membranes.
Federoff
emphasizes that his results will have to be validated in independent labs, and
in much larger studies. We also have to look at different age groups and a more
diverse racial mix, and we need longer study periods.
Ease of use
Monique
Breteler, head of epidemiology at the German Centre for Neurodegenerative
Diseases in Bonn, says that a test based on Federoff biomarker set would be
advantageously simple. If you are to screen the population for those destined
to get Alzheimer, and who may therefore benefit from any treatment that is
developed, she says, then you need to use material you can access easily, like
blood.
Some
groups are looking for molecules present in spinal fluid or biomarkers based on
brain imaging procedures that are not practical for large scale use, she adds.
Other
research has found differences in patterns of other molecules in the blood of
people with Alzheimer and healthy controls. But such case control studies fail
to take into account normal variation between individuals, says Breteler. In
general it is better to do a prospective study, like this one, so you can
follow how measurements in each individual change as their life progresses.
Nature Chemistry
Nature
Chemistry is a monthly peer reviewed
scientific journal published by nature publishing group. It was established in
April 2009. The is Stuart Cantrill. The journal covers all aspects of.
Publishing formats include primary research articles, reviews, news, views, and
highlights of notable research from other journals, commentaries, book reviews,
and correspondence. Other formats are analysis of issues such as education,
funding, policy, intellectual property, and the impact chemistry has on
society.
Nature Chemical Biology
Nature Chemical Biology is a monthly
peer reviewed, scientific journal, which is published by nature publishing
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Natural Philosophy
The
so called natural philosophy of former centuries had a somewhat different
meaning as science today.
What is nature
Science
wants to understand nature. Therefore it is important, how the word nature is defined, Nature is everything that was not made by man.
So the definition of nature excludes all things that were introduced by
mankind. All those human developments are summarized as culture. The definition of nature summarizes natural object.
Many
critics of science, including Christian philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and
William Lane Craig, attack something they call naturalism, the view that the natural world is all there is. As
Papineau notes in the, the term has no very precise meaning in philosophy, or
in science. However, as he goes on to note, there are two streams, ontological
naturalism and methodological naturalism. It is the former that I want to
discuss today.
Naturalism
relies upon there being some meaning to the term nature. It derives from the Latin word natus, meaning, birth. Nature is what you are born with. The
Greek cognate term that natural
translates is ousia which
is a form of the verb to be. But despite the role that ousia played in Christian theology phrase not one iota of difference has to do
with the Eastern and Western churches disputing whether the Son was of the same nature as the Father
homoousias or a similar nature as the Father homoousias quite
literally one iota of difference, which split Christendom, it is the Latin term
that plays a crucial role in western philosophy.
We
often see advertisements that something is all
natural, which philosophically is an absurd claim: if it exists, it is
natural even if synthesised in an industrial chemical vat. And it should also
be noted that arsenic is a natural substance, so make of that what you will.
The word natural carries a lot of
connotations.
As the nature
of any given thing is the aggregate of its powers and properties, so Nature in
the abstract is the aggregate of the powers and properties of all things.
Nature means the sum of all phenomena, together with the causes which produce
them, including not only all that happens, but all that is capable of happening,
the unused capabilities of causes being as much a part of the idea of Nature as
those which take effect.
Nature,
however, is often held to exclude the supernatural, which is defined against
the natural. If nature is all there is and their properties, then the
supernatural doesn’t exist, or is property less. This cannot be the view
Plantinga and Craig wish to defend, so the question remains, mill goes on to
note that the natural is regular and lawful, that it behaves in ways which are
predictable. This view is stressed, but not broken, by the existence of
stochastic quantum properties like quantum foam and Hawking radiation. The
regularities are just now the properties of ensembles of things, rather than of
the things themselves.
This
leads to the reason why ousia and nature were introduced. Around
the 6th century BCE, a group of philosophers known as the Milesians started to
ask what things were made of and how their properties led to the phenomena we
see around us. Previously, explanations of events were tied into the role the
gods played, rather capriciously and whimsically, in bring these events about.
Gods were responsible for the seasons, fertility, and catastrophes. Science
began when the assumption was made that the causes of things were the
properties of the parts of things, which permitted us to begin to investigate
these causes.
The
supernatural, then, is that which does not follow from the regularities of the
properties of things. The gods may have their own natures, but these are hidden
from us, and their plans are opaque.
So
Mill is roughly right, nature is the inherent properties and capacities of
things. But the word nature is much
more nuanced than this bare philosophical analysis. In our modern world, it has
a number of meanings. The historian of nature, Peter Coates, notes five
meanings,
Nature in our
time means, broadly, the world apart from human beings. The roots of this go
back a long way. For the bulk of our existence, we humans lived as foragers.
Like all species, though, we constructed our environment as much as we depended
upon it. Elephants, for example, knock down trees and generate grassland
savannahs and paths through forests. We used fire farming, selective hunting,
and co evolution with other species like dogs to create our environments. Around
12,000 years ago, though, we began to use agriculture, and this affected our
environments enormously. With a larger population density, and the effects of
goats and cattle, we changed a heavily wooded Europe and the Ancient Near East
into sparse shrub-dominated regions. The same thing happened also in America
and Australia before the Europeans arrived. Mega fauna and animals like lions
and bears were hunted to local extinction. We constructed a human environment
rapidly.
The
availability of large food stores permitted an increase in populations. The
first cities, like Ur in Mesopotamia, had thousands of individuals. By the time
Rome hit its stride that was millions. And the constructed environments we
created were inward looking. In urbanized civilizations, human society was more
isolated from nature and even the rustic tradition in Rome was not for wild
nature, but a tame agricultural environment. We saw ourselves as distinct from
nature, taming it, or civilizing it. The Christian tradition, in which humans
were the pinnacle of creation and had dominance over nature, led further into
this dualism of human natural. Even so bucolic an author as Gilbert White, whose
Natural History of Selbourne in
the 18th century is regarded as a pane to nature, thought that the purpose of
nature was for humans to find useful items.
The Arcadian vision of nature was something
for the benefit of humanity, decreed by a benevolent deity. So our separation
from nature was based upon our agrarian, civilized, theistic vision of
ourselves.
In recent years, we have seen a trend to
naturalize humans, however. We have discovered the natural causes of mental
activities and failures, of our physiology, our evolution, and even our
abilities to know the world. Philosophers have attempted to naturalise our
epistemology, our ethics and our behaviors. A perhaps the most influential of
American philosophers of the last century, Quine, was entitled Epistemology
naturalized, in which he gave an evolutionary account of how it is that we can
reliably know our world.
And this brings us back to our starting point.
Plantinga argues that naturalism, if true, is self defeating. He calls this the
Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism and. If we evolved, then we have no
warrant for our beliefs, since our beliefs are unreliable. So we cannot use
evolution to reject the idea of God. Or something. But humans are a part of
nature, as our present ecological crisis indicates. What we do has ecological
consequences. We are just as bounded by nature as anything else, and our
knowledge of the world depends on our being able to eliminate false beliefs,
either through survival of the more correct, or by a process of eliminating
beliefs that are unreliable.
In the end our idea of nature is incoherent or
needs to be revised to be coherent, as Mill suggested. The world has its
properties, and behaves regularly, and if there is a supernatural realm, then
it cannot be investigated unless it, too, follows regular patterns.
Ad agencies might try to sell us on all natural whole grain goodness, natural
homeopathic remedies, non toxic, all natural household cleansers but in
everyday language, the word natural
is often used to describe goods that are wholesome or not made by humans, but
in the language of, natural has
a much broader meaning. Within science, the term natural refers to any element of the physical universe whether
made by humans or not. This includes matter, the forces that act on matter,
energy, and the constituents of the biological world, humans, human society,
and the products of that society. So even though we might not think of them as natural, science can study things like the
human smile, human decision making, artificial sweetener, and learning
algorithms for robots because they are part of the physical universe around us.
In practice,
what's natural is often identified by testability. Natural things behave in
predictable ways though we may not yet fully understand them which have
observable outcomes. This predictability means that we can about natural
entities by making. Ghosts, for example, are supernatural entities without a basis in the physical universe
and so are not subject to the of that universe. Hence, ghosts are outside the
purview of science, and we cannot study their existence with the tools of
science. If, however, we hypothesize ghosts to be natural entities, made up of matter and energy and bound by the
laws of the universe, then we can
study them with the tools of science and
must accept the outcome if the tests we perform suggest that ghosts do not
exist as natural entities.
What Is Nature Versus Nurture
The
nature versus nurture debate is one of the oldest issues in psychology. The
debate centers on the relative contributions of and to human development.
Some
philosophers such as Plato and Descartes suggested that certain things are
inborn, or that they simply occur naturally regardless of environmental
influences. People who take the position that all or most behaviours and
characteristics are the result of inheritance are known as nativists. Other
well known thinkers such as John Locke believed in what is known as tabula rasa, which suggests that the
mind begins as a blank slate. According to this notion, everything that we are
and all of our knowledge is determined by our experience. People who take the
position that all or most behaviours and characteristics are the result of
learning are known as empiricists.
Examples of Nature Versus Nurture
A
few examples of biologically determined characteristics include certain genetic
diseases, eye color, hair color, and skin color. Other things like life
expectancy and height have a strong biological component, but they are also
influenced by environmental factors and lifestyle.
An
example of a nativists theory within psychology is Chomsky concept of a
language acquisition device. According to this theory, all children are born
with an instinctive mental capacity that allows them to both learn and produce
language.
A
number of characteristics are tied to environmental influences. How a person
behaves can be tied to influence such as parenting styles and learned
experiences. For example, a child might learn through observation and
reinforcement to say. Another child might learn to behave aggressively by
observing older children engage in violent behavior on the playground. One
example of an empiricist theory within psychology is Albert Bandura. According
to theory, people learn by observing the behavior of others.
Contemporary Views of
Nature Versus Nurture
Today,
the majority of experts believe that behavior and development are influenced by
both nature and nurture. However, the issue still rages on in many areas such
as in the debate on the origins of homosexuality and influences on. While few
people take the extreme nativists or extreme empiricist approach, researchers
and experts still debate the degree to which biology and environment influence
behavior.
Human nature
Human nature refers to the distinguishing
characteristics, including ways of thinking and acting, that human tend to have
naturally, independently of the influence of. The questions of what these
characteristics are, what causes them, and how fixed human nature is, are
amongst the oldest and most important questions in questions have particularly important
implications in, and. This is partly
because human nature can be regarded as both a source of norms of conduct or
ways of life, as well as presenting obstacles or constraints on living a good
life. The complex implication of such questions are also dealt with in and,
while the multiple branches of the together form an important domain of inquiry
into human nature, and the question of what it is to be human.
The branches of contemporary science associated
with the study of human nature include anthropology, Sociology, and, psychology,
particularly, evolutionary psychology, and developmental psychology. The nature
versus nurture debate is a broadly inclusive and well known instance of a
discussion about human nature in the natural science.
Socratic philosophy
Philosophy in is the ultimate origin of the
western conception of the nature of a thing. The philosophical study of human
nature itself originated, according to Aristotle at least, with, who turned
philosophy from study of the heavens to study of the human things. Socrates is
said to have studied the question of how a person should best live, but he left
no written works. It is clear from the works of his students and, and also what
was said by about him, that Socrates was a and believed that the best life and
the life most suited to human nature involved reasoning. The Socratic school
was the dominant surviving influence in philosophical discussion in the,
amongst, and Jewish photosphere.
The human in the works of Plato and Aristotle has
a divided nature, divided in a specifically human way. One part is specifically
human and rational, and divided into a part which is rational on its own, and a
spirited part which can understand reason. Other parts of the soul are home to
desires or passions similar to those found in animals. In both Aristotle and
Plato spiritedness, thumos, is
distinguished from the other passions or epithumiai.
The proper function of the rational
was to rule the other parts of the soul, helped by spiritedness. By this
account, using one reason is the best way to live, and philosophers are the
highest types of humans.
Man is a conjugal animal, meaning an animal
which is born to couple when an adult, thus building a household and in more
successful cases, a clan or small village still run upon patriarchal lines.
Man is a political animal, meaning an animal
with an innate propensity to develop more complex communities the size of a
city or town, with and law making. This type of community is different in kind
from a large family, and requires the special use of human.
Man is a mimetic animal. Man loves to use his
imagination. He says we enjoy looking at accurate likenesses of things which
are themselves painful to see, obscene beasts, for instance, and corpses
For Aristotle, reason is not only what is most
special about humanity compared to other animals, but it is also what we were
meant to achieve at our best. Much of Aristotle description of human nature is
still influential today, but the particular idea that humans are meant or intended to be something, has
become much less popular in modern times.
For the Socratics, human natures, and all
natures, are metaphysical concepts. Aristotle developed the standard
presentation of this approach with his theory of. Human nature is an example of
a according to Aristotle. Their teleological concept of nature is associated
with humans having a divine component in their psyches, which is most properly
exercised in the lifestyle of the philosopher, which is thereby also the
happiest and least painful life.
Modernism
One of the defining changes occurring at the end
of the middle Ages is the end of the dominance of Aristotelian philosophy, and
its replacement by a new approach to the study of nature, including human
nature. In this approach, all attempts at conjecture about formal and was
rejected as useless speculation. Also, the term law of nature now applies any regular and predictable pattern in
nature, not literally a law made by a divine law maker, and in the same way human nature becomes not a special
metaphysical cause, but simply whatever can be said to be typical tendencies of
humans.
Although this new realism applied to the study of
human life from the beginning, for example in works, the definitive argument
for the final rejection of Aristotle was associated especially with, and then,
whose new approach returned philosophy or to its focus upon non human things.
Then all claimed to be the first to properly use a modern Baconian scientific
approach to human things.
Hobbes famously followed Descartes in describing
humanity as matter in motion, just like machines. He also very influentially
described man natural state as one where life would be solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish and short. Following him, philosophy of also saw human nature as a. In
this view, the mind is at birth a blank
slate without rules, so data are added, and rules for processing them are
formed solely by our sensory experiences.
Jean Jacques Rousseau pushed the approach of
Hobbes to an extreme and criticized it at the same time. He was a contemporary
and acquaintance of Hume, writing before the and long before and. He shocked
with his Second Discourse by proposing that humans had once been solitary
animals, without reason or language or communities, and had developed these
things due to accidents of pre history. In other words, Rousseau argued that
human nature was not only not fixed, but not even approximately fixed compared
to what had been assumed before him. Humans are political, and rational, and
have language now, but originally they had none of these things. This in turn
implied that living under the management of human reason might not be a happy
way to live at all, and perhaps there is no ideal way to live. Rousseau is also
unusual in the extent to which he took the approach of Hobbes, asserting that
primitive humans were not even naturally social. A civilized human is therefore
not only imbalanced and unhappy because of the mismatch between civilized life
and human nature, but unlike Hobbes, Rousseau also became well known for the
suggestion that primitive humans had been happier nobel savages.
Rousseau conception of human nature has been seen
as the origin of many intellectual and political developments of the 19th and
20th centuries. He was an important influence upon, Kant, Hegel, and Marx, and
the development of German Idealism, Historicism, and Romanticism.
What human nature did entail, according to
Rousseau and the other modernists of the 17th and 18th centuries, were animal like
passions that led humanity to develop language and reasoning, and more complex
communities.
In contrast to Rousseau, David Hume was a critic
of the oversimplifying and systematic approach of Hobbes and Rousseau and some
others whereby, for example, all human nature is assumed to be driven by
variations of selfishness. Influenced by and, he argued against
oversimplification. On the one hand he accepted that for many political and
economic subjects people could be assumed to be driven by such simple
selfishness, and he also wrote of some of the more social aspects of human nature as something which could
be destroyed, for example if people did not associate in just societies. On the
other hand he rejected what he called the paradox
of the sceptics saying that no politician could have invented words like honourable
and shameful, lovely and odious, noble and despicable, unless there was not
some natural original constitution of the mind.
He was accused of being an atheist. Concerning
human nature also, he wrote for example, It's enough that we experience this as
a force in human nature. Our examination of causes must stop somewhere.
After Rousseau and Hume, the nature of philosophy
and science changes, branching into different disciplines and approaches, and
the study of human nature changes accordingly. Rousseau proposal that human
nature is malleable became a major influence upon international revolutionary
movements of various kinds, while Hume approach has been more typical in Anglo Saxon
countries including the united states.
Natural science
As the sciences concerned with humanity split up
into more specialized branches, many of the key figures of this evolution
expressed influential understandings about human nature.
Darwin
gave a widely accepted scientific argument for what Rousseau had already argued
from a different direction, that humans and other animal species have no truly
fixed nature, at least in the very long term. However he also gave modern
biology a new way of understanding how human nature does exist in a normal
human time frame, and how it is caused.
Sigmund
Freud, the founder of, famously referred to the hidden pathological
character of typical human behavior. He believed that the Marxists were right
to focus on what he called the decisive influence which the economic
circumstances of men have upon their intellectual, ethical and artistic
attitudes. But he thought that the Marxist view of the class struggle was too
shallow, assigning to recent centuries conflicts that were, rather, primordial.
Behind the class struggle, according to Freud, there stands the struggle
between father and son, between established clan leader and rebellious challenger.
Freud also popularized his notions of the and the desires associated with each
supposed aspect of personality.
E.O. Wilson Sociobiology and closely related
theory of give scientific arguments against the tabula rasa hypotheses of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. In
his book, The Unity of Knowledge
claimed that it was time for a cooperation of all the sciences to explore human
nature. He defined human nature as a collection of epigenetic rules the genetic
patterns of mental development. Cultural phenomena, rituals, etc. are products,
not part of human nature. Artworks, for example are not part of human nature,
but our appreciation of is. And this art appreciation or our fear for snakes,
or incest taboo can be studied by the methods of reductionism. Until now these
phenomena were only part of psychological, sociological and anthropological
studies. Wilson proposes it can be part of interdisciplinary research.
An example of
this fear is discussed in the book, where suggests a hypothesis that humans,
just like other primates, have inherited instinctive reactions to snakes, large
cats and birds of prey. Folklore have features that are combinations of these
three, which would explain why dragons with similar features occur in stories
from independent cultures on all continents. Other authors have suggested that
especially under the influence of drugs or in children dreams, this instinct
may give raise to fantasies and nightmares about dragons, snakes, spiders,
etc., which makes these symbols popular in drug culture and in fairy tales for
children. The traditional mainstream explanation to the folklore dragons does
however not rely on human instinct, but on the assumption that fossils of, for
example, gave rise to similar fantasies all over the world.
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