Naturale e Artificiale
According to traditional philosophical and anthropological views, the creation and transmission of culture is something which pertains uniquely to human beings.The aim of this paper is to show how the data and arguments produced by a number of contemporary sciences seem, on the contrary, increasingly to soften the differences between "natural" organic and inorganic products and the "artificial" products that specifically result from human culture. To begin with, the idea that both individual (ontogenetic) and collective (phylogenetic) human and animal adaptive processes are knowledge-producing processes is one of the most widespread and long-established theses of the so-called "evolutionary epistemology", as represented by D.T. Campbell, K. Lorenz, and K.R. Popper. Secondly, ethological studies have been producing evidence for a number of cases of technical abilility displayed by non-human species, particularly the ability to use and build tools at a level which can be definitely compared to the human one. It is worth noting, however, that no particular need to emphasize the "natural versus artificial" debate is usually associated with the reporting of this evidence. If the notion of "behavior" is applied to the vegetable realm, it will become possible to see a number of specific ontogenetic and phylogenetic adaptive traits displayed by certain plants as knowledge-producing "inventions" or "discoveries" which enable these organisms to survive in an environment that has become very different from the one in which they originally developed (due to, for instance, the action of technological human products intentionally meant to be, or casually resulting, highly toxic to the plants' life.) From this point of view, the only attribution of knowledge that would still maintain a metaphorical quality is the one regarding those processes in the inorganic realm which result in phenomena that are analogue to the ones typically exploited by human technology: from the chain reactions in an uranium deposit which turned itself into a nuclear reactor to the hypothetical or real synchronization processes which make certain stellar phenomena very similar to the laser, maser or synchrotron radiations produced in our laboratories. To this "cybernetics of the non-living systems", proposed by N. Wiener, we must add the more recently developed philosophical interpretations of "artificial intelligence", which see our use of computers as a thoroughly "natural" extension to certain non-living materials of a number of human brain functions. The link between biological and cultural evolution proposed by evolutionary epistemology could be paralleled by a link between the studies on, respectively, natural and artificial intelligence, in order to make it possible for both fields to apply Darwinian selectionism and to endow our electronic devices with some of the creative capabilities of natural brains. If these attempts proved to be successful, human ethology would end up considering the current distinction between natural and specifically cultural human products as artful as the above-mentioned distinction between natural and artificial animal products.