Nature Doesn't Know Best
The problem with trusting your intuition
The other day, I watched a video of a farmer explaining how to prune tomato plants in order to yield an optimal harvest. In the comment section, a home gardener said, “I don’t prune my tomatoes and I have a great big harvest every year.” Someone else responded to them with, “Exactly. Nature knows best.”
So, here’s the thing: No it doesn’t.
In this specific case, tomatoes as we know them wouldn’t exist without human intervention. 80,000 years ago (before human cultivation), there are traces of a plant existing in Ecuador that is believed to be the ancestor of the modern tomato (note that it’s not really getting called a tomato). These fruits were the size of blueberries and actually still exist today, and I think the fact that no one is growing huge amounts of these things proves that they don’t have as much flavor or nutritional value as a cultivated tomato.1
Nature didn’t patiently select the juiciest and sweetest tomatoes. Nature didn’t figure out that tomatoes thrive in heat. Nature didn’t figure out that the plants impart more nutrients into the fruits when you prune the leaves!
Sitting at home watching a youtube short while your tomatoes (carefully cultivated for home gardens) grow bushy in your yard, it’s more romantic to think that nature knows best. After all, you don’t have to do a thing, except maybe water, and you get pints and pints of juicy red tomatoes! Maybe you even think back to our lazy nomadic ancestors, who just walked outside and ate all the berries and rabbits they came across. “Wow,” you think, “I’m just like them.”
In middle school, we learned about the scientific process by designing our own experiments. We came up with a hypothesis, figured out how to isolate and test different variables, ran our tests, and wrote out the conclusions of our studies. And still, we were told, whatever our experiment revealed doesn’t mean anything until other people repeat the experiment, over and over, to get the same results. It takes a long time to determine something is a fact.
The thing is, it’s a lot easier to stop at the hypothesis. It feels right! You might even run the experiment in your head and see it work out for you. And in the same science class, we were taught that humans evolved to be smart; our ancestors are all of the early humans who knew enough to not die. So we can tell ourselves our hypotheses are something else, actually: they’re nature itself. That’s our instinct.
But how can we untangle our natural (God-given?) instinct from our unnatural (Satanic?) biases and prejudices? How do we untangle our instinct from chronic anxiety or OCD? How do we untangle our instinct from our lazy desire to not want to prune a tomato bush?
The uncomfortable truth is that we can’t. And it’s not because Satan is a lil’ trickster, it’s because evolution is a messy and imperfect process. It’s because nature is a messy and imperfect thing. And believing that this chaotic thing could “know best” is our biggest roadblock as a society.
First of all, I know you’re already thinking of ways intuition or nature can be correct. So let me try to get ahead of you with a few examples I’ve been thinking about lately.
Maternal Instinct! I used to think that most mothers, unless they were “wired wrong,” had some kind of maternal instinct that kicked in the second they held their newborn baby, which guided them through the trials that come with raising a child. Sure, I knew that expectant mothers often take classes or hire midwives or learn from their own mothers, but I assumed that was about the extraneous stuff, like diapers and schedules. I figured something kicks in when it comes to life or death situations.
I was wrong! Yes, there seems to be some kind of special love that mothers usually feel, a desire to prioritize their baby’s needs, but giving birth doesn’t give you some sort of internal manual about choking hazards. It turns out, a lot of safety risks for babies have been learned through trial and error, unfortunately. And as someone who’s freshly graduated from a safe sleep class, I can tell you that many of the safest practices aren’t what a lot of people (including mothers!) assume they are.
Some people think putting babies to sleep on their side is safer than their back because they think the baby might choke if they throw up in their sleep. Oh yeah, I thought, like a drunk friend. Actually, the placement of a baby’s esophagus and trachea makes it so that on their back, they physically can’t breathe in throw up. Good to know!
Putting babies aside, I could also tell you about everyone I know who has traumas caused by their mother, who often was just making the best decisions she could, working with maternal instinct and love. And what about adoptive and foster mothers? When would their instincts kick in? What about fathers? Have I been assuming they’re less capable of providing safety and love?
Let’s move on to the elephant in the room: the Paleo Diet! The belief that eating the way our most feral ancestors ate is the key to peak health and optimal performance2. I’ve never once followed the Paleo diet, or any of its freakish offshoots,3 but they’ve been pushed by my algorithm so much that I catch myself believing in them to some degree. I find myself looking for less processed alternatives, shrinking from seed oils, etc., all in this belief that the healthiest way of eating must be whatever is the closest to what I would eat in the wild.
The truth of the matter is that overthinking every food choice is much less healthy than simply eating the variety of foods available to us. In this article, Jessica Clifford, M.S., R.D.N., explains why seed oils don’t need to be feared, and concludes with, “It’s important to remember that we need a variety of foods in our diet to be healthy, and all foods really can fit. One food may help our health in one way but be harmful to health in another way when too much is consumed, while another food may have the opposite effect.” Why would it be better to eat like some imaginary ancestor in our head, who’s not starving but is actually at the peak of his game, than to eat in the way dietitians suggest?
Before I move on, I need to address Conspiracy Theories. Because they don’t get popular out of nowhere— often, they sound like something that could be true. I’m going to use an example from a Christian podcast that I listened to: This couple thinks Jesus already came and Revelation already happened, and since that time, humans have lost technological (and other) advances that we used to have. Think about it, they say, why can’t anyone pinpoint what made the Roman Empire fall? Why is Roman concrete stronger than what we have today? It’s because plagues and fire wiped out most of the human population, and the rest of them were so tortured they forgot to write anything down!
If I didn’t know anything about history, I’d think this is honestly a pretty convincing conspiracy theory. I like stories, and I like being able to blame one big thing for lots of little messes. And I think a lot of people do, too. But the problem with their theory, besides the supernatural element, is that (say it with me) nature is chaotic! Which makes people chaotic, which makes our history chaotic. What they could’ve learned from 10th grade history class is that the fall of Rome was brought about by all kinds of problems picking away at it. There was no clean ending like a revolution or something, and there didn’t need to be. Just like how the world didn’t need to end for some knowledge to be forgotten4— knowledge is forgotten every day for much sillier reasons.
What happens when we rely on our belief in our own instinct, or if we trust that nature knows best?
We have grounds for our prejudice. If I feel I am safer with one race than another, I could call it “survival instinct” and brush it off instead of examining my own implicit biases and putting in work to undo them.
We lose lives, because we all assume we can naturally know how to keep ourselves and others alive, or because we assume people who can’t live without help deserve to die from “natural selection.”
We ground our beliefs in what “feels true” instead of what has been proven by experts, so doctors and medicines don’t need training or testing, engineers are useless, and, really, there’s no need to learn very much at all.
Ohhh, I see. . . we’d all have to put in much less work! But gosh, we’d never get anything done.
Even though I’ve been thinking about this topic for weeks now, the truth of the matter is, I still rely on my instincts. It’d be unnatural not to! It’s more convenient to assume the rain has been watering my seeds enough than to look up how much rain it takes to actually permeate deeply into the soil. It makes me feel better when I’m watching my students climb a rock wall to think that my instincts will give me special reflexes and strength to catch them if they fall.5 I still believe that my body can tell me what nutrients I’m lacking through cravings, and I’m still wrestling with how to fit that into my newfound realization about instinct.
So I don’t think we all need to give up our belief in our own instincts, or in the divinity of the natural world/God’s creation. Or, really, I don’t think we can. At the end of the day, we’re nature, too, so we follow the natural course of imperfection. But! I sure think we should all try a little harder to be critical of our instinct. And the next time you bite into a sweet, juicy tomato, just remember: Nature doesn’t know best!
It’s not relevant, but I have to point out that most people who follow paleo are willing to eat processed foods with the label “paleo” on them, and often eat way more meat than whatever they would be able to hunt, not to mention the out of season and region berries that wouldn’t exist without farming. . . fuck, here I go again down the farming rabbit hole. . . Anyway, I’d like to see them try to truly live off of foraging alone and see how long they last.
The “carnivore diet” and “fruitarians” funnily enough seem to both derive from this way of thinking in my opinion.
I didn’t fact check the concrete thing, actually, this is just assuming that it’s true, or even just based on the idea that it was at least true for a long time.
I thought this before it happened, then it did, and I realized it does not take a whole lot of reflexes and strength to catch a three year old, just a normal, non-instinctual amount.
Appeals to nature are the most obnoxious thing to me for some reason. It’s one of my biggest philosophical shibboleths. So I’m here for all this nature-appeal bashing lol.
people love to be lazy and not think !!!! that’s what gets us into trouble !!! i think a combo of listening to your body/instinct but also learning from experts and logically reevaluating your choices is the sweet spot. i love this essay and ur so funny