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Nature. A timelapse composite panorama of different natural phenomena and environments around Mount Bromo, Indonesia. Nature is an inherent character or constitution, [ 1] particularly of the ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the laws, elements and phenomena of the physical world, including life.
A measure of disorder in the universe or of the unavailability of the energy in a system to do work. [7] Entropy and disorder also have associations with equilibrium. [8] Technically, entropy, from this perspective, is defined as a thermodynamic property which serves as a measure of how close a system is to equilibrium—that is, to perfect ...
Devolution (biology) Devolution, de-evolution, or backward evolution (not to be confused with dysgenics) is the notion that species can revert to supposedly more primitive forms over time. The concept relates to the idea that evolution has a divine purpose ( teleology) and is thus progressive ( orthogenesis ), for example that feet might be ...
In it, he outlined his ideas for the hierarchical classification of the natural world, dividing it into the animal kingdom (regnum animale), the plant kingdom (regnum vegetabile), and the "mineral kingdom" (regnum lapideum). Linnaeus's Systema Naturae lists only about 10,000 species of organisms, of which about 6,000 are plants and 4,236 are ...
Overexploitation. Atlantic cod stocks were severely overexploited in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to their abrupt collapse in 1992. [ 1] Overexploitation, also called overharvesting, refers to harvesting a renewable resource to the point of diminishing returns. [ 2] Continued overexploitation can lead to the destruction of the resource, as it ...
Opposite (semantics) In lexical semantics, opposites are words lying in an inherently incompatible binary relationship. For example, something that is male entails that it is not female. It is referred to as a 'binary' relationship because there are two members in a set of opposites. The relationship between opposites is known as opposition.
The natural sciences continued to be called natural philosophy, but the adoption of the scientific method took science beyond the realm of philosophical conjecture and introduced a more structured way of examining nature. [66] Newton, an English mathematician, and physicist was the seminal figure in the scientific revolution. [69]
Appeal to nature. An appeal to nature is a rhetorical technique for presenting and proposing the argument that "a thing is good because it is 'natural', or bad because it is 'unnatural'." [1] In debate and discussion, an appeal-to-nature argument can be considered to be a bad argument, because the implicit primary premise "What is natural is ...