The Return of the Nature Fakers

I don't know what to call this Zach Weinersmith strip (of which this is only the first panel), because it looks like Zach Weiner's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip but it's over at Matt Bors' The Nib site, and there's a different strip up today at SMBC. So I guess it's an exclusive for the Nib, and, if it's archival, I hadn't seen it, so that's okay, too.

Matt has recently made a major expansion to his offerings which means that, if you didn't have it bookmarked before, you should do that now.

It's also different from SMBC in that, when I use a strip from that site, I get the whole shebang in one "save image," but here I have only the opening panel and would have to go back and take each panel separately, which gets into a section of the "fair use" area that makes me squirm.

Very clever, Mr. Bors. I suppose you think you will force my readers to visit your site in order to read the whole thing?

Works for me. Go. Read. I'll wait.

Everybody back? Okay.

Weiner's approach in all his work is punching holes in faulty logic or poor scientific thinking, and this is not only a good defense of science, but also funny except to the humorless folks who will insist that, no, dolphins would indeed act on behalf of the greater good because ... well ... because Flipper.

Which puts the rest of us who like dolphins in a difficult position because, although we like dolphins and are ready to acknowledge that the cetacean brain is remarkably well-developed and that we wish Marineland would let them all go home, there are limits to the degree to which we are willing to allow anthropomorphic nonsense to override the functioning of our own well-developed brains.

I know that sounds harsh, but this is more than a fallacy. It's a pathetic fallacy.

Now, I'm not as tedious and humorless as this fellow:

Thus, when  NASA tells children  that, “the moving object, due to its mass, wants to keep going,” it misleads them with the pathetic fallacy. For, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, an inanimate mass doesn’t have any wants. Well, there is a belief system which posits that everything contains a spirit which motivates and directs its actions, and that system is called animism. But, animism is not science. So, apparently we have NASA promoting animism among our children under the guise of promoting science. This is scary.

No, it's not "scary." It's a metaphor and a transparently mild one that you shouldn't worry about.

Granted, Newton's First Law of Motion doesn't assume that rocks possess free will. But it also doesn't assume that they have mass or shape. Are you teaching children that objects exist as single points without mass? Horrors!

I'm thinking maybe his responsible, metaphor-free lecture is the science class Ferris Bueller would have gone to right after social studies if he'd gone to school at all that day.

But at the other end of the scale is the person who really doesn't differentiate between science and fantasy, and for whom any demonstration of emotion or intelligence by an animal is evidence of a fully developed emotional system on a par with our own.

To which they would say, "How do you know it isn't?" to which I would say, "Go read Zach's cartoon."

And the problem becomes heightened by their insistence on dividing the world into a Manichean black/white universe of people who either accept their blissful, romanticized view of Eden or else favor the wholesale destruction of the ecosystem.

The notion that there are people who love and seek to protect nature on its own terms is beyond their ken.

I just finished a project on Theodore Roosevelt and John Burroughs that includes a chapter on the "Nature Fakers."

The dust up began with an article by Burroughs -- himself a best-selling nature writer -- in Atlantic Monthly that blasted the sentimental claptrap of writers who purported to explain natural history but made up false and often ludicrous examples of human-like animal behavior, ranging from mother otters consciously teaching their children to swim to the report of a fox who deliberately lured pursuing dogs onto a railway bridge just in time to cross it himself but leave them to destruction. 

"The presumption," Burroughs wrote, "is that the fox had a watch and a timetable about his person."

Roosevelt followed with a supporting piece in which he employed even more sarcasm than his good friend: "In one story a woodcock is described as making a kind of mud splint for its broken leg; it seems a pity not to have added that it also made itself a crutch to use while the splint was on."

They conceded that stories like the Uncle Remus folktales and Kipling's "Jungle Books" were entertaining and harmless, but that this was because they weren't presented as factual.

As Roosevelt wrote, "Most of us have enjoyed novels like 'King Solomon's Mines,' for instance. But if Mr. Rider Haggard had insisted that his novels were not novels but records of actual fact, we should feel a mild wonder at the worthy persons who accepted them as serious contributions to the study of African geography and ethnology."

And, in an interview, he added, "As for the matter of giving these books to the children for the purpose of teaching them the facts of natural history -- why it's an outrage."

Bearing in mind that Roosevelt banished far greater social menaces in his time that we have since decided should have a place at the table -- monopolies, wealthy political donors, food processors trusted to inspect their own products -- the return of the nature fakers may not be the saddest abandonment of his legacy.

Still, the more we abandon our rural communities and center our population in cities, the more important it becomes to root out nonsense in how we view that increasingly distant, increasingly endangered natural world.

Otherwise?

Otherwise, this:

 

 

Comments

[Richard J. Marcej]

Well said Mike. (and kudos on the inclusion of perhaps one of the funniest Senfeld bits ever!)

[Brian O'C]

Curse You! I needed a short break from correcting final exams. You time-machined me into the archive; a time...a time, before I started reading you every day. Sigh...an hour later...

[Mike Peterson]

Just part of my ongoing campaign to subvert our educational system!