Folks are dumb where I come from
They ain 't had any learnin'
Still they 're happy as can be
Do-In What Comes Nat-ur-lly
—Irving Berlin, Doin' What Comes Natur'lly
Smart Americans as well as dumb ones have always held a special belief in what comes natur'lly. That belief appears to grow stronger as society pulls further away from nature. As ever more synthetic artifacts of Western civilization emerge from laboratories and test tubes, a great many people have developed an outright crush on nature. Indeed, the supposedly natural is so warmly regarded nowadays that the...