umwelt

"Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after."

— Annie Dillard (An American Childhood) 

n(Biology, psychology)  

the environmental factors, collectively,that are capable of affecting the behaviour of an animal or individual C20: from German Umwelt environment) 

Naming Nature, by Carol Kaesuk Yoon, is a thought-provoking text that plays a new and fascinating tune on the old theme of objectivity versus subjectivity. Its subject is the history of biological systematics—the description, ordering and explanation of biological diversity.

In Yoon’s rendition, subjectivity is rooted firmly in our instinct. She explains that neuroscience, anthropology and evolutionary biology now tell us that we are born with the remnants of an instinctive perspective on the living world, which she calls the “human umwelt,” a vision “molded during our species’ days as hunter-gatherers.” This vision of a natural order is “thoroughly sensuous and wildly subjective,” Yoon says, and she maintains that the history of scientific taxonomy is really a “two-hundred-year-long battle against the human umwelt.” In modern times, we have given up this instinctive perception of the order of nature in favor of letting scientists find a more objective, evolutionary order, with the result that we are now disconnected from nature: “We are so used to someone else being in charge of the living world that we have begun not to even see the life around us.”

C K Yoon

B.S. in biology from Yale and a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/on-the-origin-of-taxonomy