All fungi are edible.
Some fungi are only edible once.
-Terry Pratchett
Greetings, greetings, fellow travelers! I have returned with yet another logical fallacy for your contemplation!
Today, for your consideration: the Appeal to Nature.
The argument is a simple one, and one that you’ve probably come across before. It runs along these lines:
X is good because it is natural / occurs in nature / is not man made. Or, conversely, Y is bad because is not natural / does not occur in nature / is man made.
A little bit of thought into this should be enough to put this one to bed (you’d think, and yet it widely persists). For example, polio is natural. Botulism is natural. Smallpox was natural. Bubonic plague is natural. And so on and so forth. Pretty sure you’d be hard pressed to find anyone claiming any of those are “good” — well, maybe the botulism if you’re into Botox.
Of course, a response to this might be “I’m not talking about diseases!”
Well, ok then. Cyanide and arsenic are natural and will most certainly kill you at the right dose. Sulphuric acid is likewise natural and will do some unpleasant things to you as well if you take a bath in it, or take a big ol’ swig of it at the right concentrations. Being bitten by a “natural” rattlesnake or brown recluse spider is not particularly good for you (or, for that matter, shark, bear, tiger or squirrel). Heck, uranium is natural but I doubt people want their fillings made out of it.
And of course there are plenty of man made things that are good (and of course “good” and “bad” are a bit of a subjective value judgement in any case). For example, vaccines and modern medicines to name a couple obvious ones.
Usually, this fallacy is used when it comes to things like food, drink and medicine. Not many people go so far as to say “automobiles ‘taint natural, so I’m not drivin’ one!” or something of that sort (though there are occasional hard-core back-to-nature, off-the-grid types that come pretty close). The argument is usually that because a food or drink is “natural” it’s therefore automatically better for you than an “unnatural” food or drink. Or that some herbal home remedy is better for you based on the fact that it uses “natural” ingredients.
And yeah, eating an apple is probably going to be “better” for you, generally speaking, than a bag of cheese puffs. But, as the saying goes, “the dose makes the poison.” That bag of cheese puffs, if an occasional treat, probably isn’t going to hurt you in the slightest. Eating almost nothing but apples every day for awhile will probably leave you malnourished with lots of deficiencies (pfft, who needs vitamin D anyway, right?). Simply assuming that because something occurs in nature it is therefore automatically “better” than something man made is a fallacious bit of thinking. And this doesn’t even go down the whole rabbit hole of defining “natural” — is corn natural, when it’s been so cultivated by humans over millennia that it bears no resemblance to its original ancestor (and the same holds true for a lot of cultivated foods)?
This fallacy is positively notorious as an advertising ploy. How many times have you seen in a commercial or advertisement — or right on a product package or market signage — that something is “All Natural” or has only “Natural Ingredients?”
In some cases, this is a relatively harmless fallacy. Someone eating more “natural foods” is probably going to be fine, maybe even a bit healthier (because they are probably more health-conscious about what they eat in general, not specifically because what they’re eating is “natural”), if probably a little lighter in the pocketbook. But where this one gets especially problematic is when it comes to two particular areas: medicine and genetically modified organisms.
The issue with medicine should be obvious — an herbal tea is probably not going to be automatically better for treating an illness than an actual medication designed to do so (grandma’s home remedy probably isn’t going to work on that cancer, I’m afraid). And as for vaccinations...well, after two years of pandemic, you’d think that one would be settled, but apparently not, huh?
GMO’s get a lot of pushback (“Frankenfoods!”) from certain folks, but let’s face it — if we’re going to resolve some of the world’s hunger issues, GMO’s are not only good, but necessary. And yet, anti-GMO forces have delayed the deployment of foods like golden rice, a GMO rice that contains beta-carotene (precursor to vitamin A). Vitamin A deficiencies are responsible for about a million deaths annually (mostly children) and another 50,000 cases of permanent blindness worldwide.
And yet, because of the fears of “unnatural” GMO’s ginned up by the anti-GMO crowd, deployment of this grain to regions that desperately need it has been stalled for years. It was developed over 20 years ago and STILL isn’t being cultivated anywhere for consumer consumption, though Bangladesh and the Philippines are probably the closest to doing it.
Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox about that one. I’ll just leave you with the thought that just because something is natural, it is not automatically good, and just because something is man made, it is not automatically bad. And, of course, I’ll leave you with the wit of the wonderful Gary Larson:
Friends, the Bootcamp series (Cognitive Bias Bootcamp and Logical Fallacies Bootcamp) are companion series intended to explain common biases and errors in our thinking and how to spot them and avoid them. Links to the complete series to date are below, so if you’ve missed any past installments, browse away!
Logical Fallacies Bootcamp:
The Strawman
The Slippery Slope
Begging the Question
Poisoning the Well
No True Scotsman!
Ad Hominem
False Dilemma
Non Sequitur
Red Herring
Gamblers Fallacy
Bandwagon Fallacy
Appeal to Fear
The Fallacy Fallacy
Appeal to Personal Incredulity
Appeal to Authority
Special Pleading
Texas Sharpshooter
Post Hoc
Cognitive Bias Bootcamp:
Bystander Effect
Curse of Knowledge
Barnum Effect
Declinism
In-Group Bias
Hindsight Bias
Survivor Bias