Natural history  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

As "Darwinism" became widely accepted in the 1870s, good-natured caricatures of him with an ape or monkey body symbolised evolution.

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Wikipedia Wiktionary Tumblr Wikisource YouTube Shop Featured: A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)

Natural history is the scientific study of plants and animals in their natural environments. It is concerned with levels of organization from the individual organism to the ecosystem, and stresses identification, life history, distribution, abundance, and inter-relationships. It often and appropriately includes an esthetic component.—Stephen Herman, 2002

Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards the observational than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research that is published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, Natural history is the systematic study of any category of natural objects or organisms. That is a very broad designation in a world filled with many narrowly focused disciplines, so while modern natural history dates historically from studies in the ancient Greco-Roman world and then the medieval Arabic world through to the scattered European Renaissance scientists working in near isolation, today's field is more of a cross discipline umbrella of many specialty sciences that like geobiology have a strong multi-disciplinary nature combining scientists and scientific knowledge of many specialty sciences.

See also

• Natural philosophy
• Natural science
• Naturalism (philosophy)
• Nature documentary
• Nature writing
• Nature
• Nature study
• Big History
• Timeline of evolution