(un)natural: Ideas about naturalness in public and political debates about science, technology and medicine

Many different ideas, associations, anxieties, hopes and fears underlie different people’s uses of the terms natural, unnatural and nature. In the diagram below we set out five broad understandings of naturalness.

People don’t necessarily fall into one category or another, and we do not say which, if any, might be a correct understanding of naturalness. Our aim is to show the different ways that these terms are used.