Biology: Evolutionary Distance, Conceptions of Nature, and the Unnaturalness Objection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Under what conditions does the perceived “unnaturalness ” of a specific application of synthetic biology influence its public acceptability? Using data from a framing experiment embedded in a national survey of Canadian adults, we argue that this consideration leads to negative perceptions of the tech-nology only when opponents of the application use rhetoric that refers to its unnaturalness and when characteristics of the application itself, such as the use of genetic material from “dissimilar ” organisms, increase the perceived relevance of such arguments. Additionally, we find that individuals who view nature as sacred or spiritual are most responsive to unnaturalness framing. Keywords unnatural, framing, food biotechnology, synthetic biology, Canada Synthetic biology is an emerging field of biotechnology that applies engi-neering principles to biological systems (Chopra & Kamma, 2005; Endy, 2005; Royal Society of Chemistry, 2008), resulting in the creation of “artifi-
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".