Please provide background on the term "Nature Faker."
Mike
Mike Hendren asks an interesting question, one I had wondered about myself, and one that I am not sure Mike Cirba quite answered. "Faker" is generally a less than positive description of someone, and was explained to me sometime back by one more familiar with the general literature of early last Century, the phrase "nature faker" was far from complimentary.
Ironically, "Nature Faker" was a derogatory description of writers who had tried to pass off sentimentalized and "sham" versions of natural history as truthful and factually based. These writers depicted animals behaving with mannerisms remarkably human, and would present their depictions as wholly truthful and factual, even though their claims had never been verified through acceptable scientific procedures. Oftentimes the claims about an animal's behavior were used to convey some strong sentimental viewpoint and moral message of the author. As a later American Heritage article (linked below) put it, "Scientists sputtered."
John Burroughs, a naturalist, got the controversy going in his 1903 titled "Real and Sham Natural History" in which he referred to such writing as "yellow journalism of he woods." And it wasn't necessarily the writer's veracity or sincerity that Burrough's it was the unscientific, but the unverified nature of their claims. After finally being convinced by mutual friends that one such "nature faker" truly believed that what he had written was accurate, Burroughs was unfazed and commented, "So now I think think of him as a mythomaniac."
The actual phrase "Nature Faker" was not coined until a few years later, in a 1907 article by Edward Clark called “Roosevelt on the Nature-Fakirs,” about President Teddy Roosevelt's low opinion of such sham natural histories. President Roosevelt was reportedly a friend of Burroughs and wholly supported Burroughs' and his 1903 article, in which Burroughs had praised those whom he thought were doing sound scientific work and blasted those who he thought were not.
Works by these
"mythomaniacs" and
"nature fakers" were rightfully portrayed as decidedly unscientific in that they were oftentimes based on a single observation or experience of the author and had not verified by similar observations by other experts in the field. Burrough's condemned one such book called "Animals I have Known" by proposing a changed title to "Animals I ALONE Have Known," strongly indicating that the observations in the book were neither verified nor verifiable. Yet despite the lack of proper verification, these works were being touted band true and accurate, were published on the cheap, and were being used in school curriculums! Naturalists like Burroughs, Roosevelt, Casper Whitney, ornithologist Frank Chapman, and others that it was a travesty that children and the public were being deceived by these works.
After years of public debate the Burroughs-Roosevelt side seems to have carried the day. Such books were removed from science curriculums, and some of the mythomaniacal Nature Faker authors no longer published "natural history." (At least one of the criticized authors, Jack London, is still widely read although his work is often considered fiction rather than science or non-fiction.) Looking back on about a quarter of the century later on these mythomaniacal "nature fakers, Robert E. Chapman, the ornithologist, wrote:
“We still have nature fakers with us, but today there is far less chance that the product of their pens will pass editorial censorship or deceive the public than there was when the former were keener for copy and the latter knew less about nature.”Chapman was relying on the publishing and review process, along with greater scientific knowledge, to ferret out these "nature fakers." Unfortunately such mechanisms have all but crumbled today. With the internet, .pdf files, and "vanity" publishing houses, about anyone can pass of anything as a "published book" these days, whether or not it is accurate and/or has undergone true critical scrutiny. This creates a very similar dilemma to the one faced by the likes of Burroughs, Roosevelt, Whitney, and Chapman obviously understood:
The search for truth and accuracy is never well served when one or a few authors claim to have established the truth based on unverified, unvetted, and unconfirmed observations, interpretations, and opinions.
Critical review, fact checking, and verification are necessary components of the truth seeking process, and if one circumvents that process through easy and cheap publication methods, then the search for true and accurate information will potentially take a wrong turn. And thus there is great potential for modern day "Nature Fakers" and "mythomaniacs" in almost any endeavor of study, or anywhere else anyone claims to know the truth of claims shielded from critical analysis. (There was an example of this recently on the global warming thread, where even though a certain scientist's claims had been thoroughly refuted, his continued to claim his views had legitimacy because he had supposedly corrected the errors and reached the same conclusions in a paper that had not yet been published in a properly reviewed publication. This raises the issue of why wasn't the corrected version published after undergoing proper review? Such questions should be asked of anything published without proper review.)
Anyway, that is a bit of background on the phrase "nature faker" as it was used in the first part of last century and as it still applies today.
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If anyone is further interested in the topic of "Sham Natural History" or "Nature Fakers" you can check out John Burrough's 1903 article "Real and Sham Natural Histories," which is available on Google Books, as is an article discussing the matter called "Reminiscences on John Borrows" by G. Clyde Fisher from the March-April 1921 issue of Natural History magazine.
Here is a link to a 1971 American Heritage article discussing the controversy from which some of the information and quotes are taken. http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1971/2/1971_2_60.shtml The same article notes that the phrase "nature faker" was common enough to have been placed in the "Dictionary of Americanisms."
There is also a book, published in 1990 and republished in 2001, called
The Nature Fakers. It covers the topic in detail.
[Interesting the title of this book is very similar to the .pdf/cd. Did the authors know? A Rights Clearance check at any reputable publisher probably have caught that. Likewise, an editor at a reputable publishing house might have cautioned the authors of the .pdf/cd against saddling William Flynn with such a derogatory phrase. But I guess at 2200 pages these guys weren't interested in what an editor might have had to say.]