Nature - autonomous learning

98 the ‘nature’ of geographyof their socio-cultural environment. As this debate has unfolded, newbiotechnologies have been invented that promise to alter ‘human nature’so that behavioural ‘disorders’ or congenital diseases can, potentially,be engineered out of existence. In this context, many people worry thatwe’re witnessing a new biological determinism to rival the eugenic beliefspopular in Western countries in the 1920s and 1930s. The concern isthat beliefs about the supposed links between a person’s genes and theirbehaviour or appearance will be used to target those with an ‘inferior’or ‘abnormal’ genetic constitution. Clearly, human geographers’ recentinsights into the mind and body pose a challenge to such deterministicideas.They show that claims about ‘natural kinds’ often conceal the biasesand the group interests of those who make these claims.And the rest of geography during the 1990s?While human geographers (re)discovered nature in a paradoxical (i.e.de-naturalising) way, physical geography during the 1990s remainedfirmly focused on the natural environment and retained the aspiration toproduce ‘scientific’ (i.e. truthful and objective) knowledge of the nonhumanworld (see, for example, Rhoads and Thorn 1996).Though manyhuman geographers still classified themselves as scientific researchers,it’s fair to say that physical geographers used the appellation more widelyand unself-consciously than their counterparts did. Previous tendenciestowards specialisation in their ‘half’ of the discipline intensified, in partbecause new measurement and monitoring techniques produced greatervolumes of seemingly more accurate information about particular facetsof the environment. Indeed, an ostensibly ‘new’ branch of physical geographygained momentum through the 1990s: namely, Quaternary studies(i.e. the study of environmental change during the Quaternary era, a recentperiod geologically speaking). With specialisation came fragmentation,leading some (e.g. Slaymaker and Spencer 1998; Gregory et al. 2002) tocall for a more unified physical geography that could trace the interactionsbetween the different environmental ‘spheres’ (litho-, hydro- etc).The trendtoward case-study research also continued (especially in geomorphology),while increased computing-power permitted more complex analysis ofever-larger data sets.In terms of change (rather than continuity), 1990s physical geographyaltered in three main ways. First, the balance between pure and applied