Concept · Cognitive Bias: Informal fallacies of relevance
Appeal to nature
Origin: Traditional; 20th century naming
Biological Parallel
Poison dart frogs sequester toxins from their diet—captive-bred individuals fed artificial food are harmless, wild-caught ones are lethal. The 'natural' version isn't superior, just different based on environmental inputs. Yet humans show strong preferences for 'natural' substances despite equivalent or superior synthetic alternatives. This bias likely evolved because ancestral environments had consistent cause-effect relationships: plants, water, and foods encountered for millennia were safer than novel substances. Modern synthesis broke this correlation, but the heuristic persists.