Oof, that's a tall order, isn't it? I'm no professional philosopher, and not somebody who works all day making dictionary definitions, but the general sense of natural / artificial here is "not by humans" versus "by humans", although that's not very precise and you'll get into trouble if you read too much into much into it. There are loads of ways in which you'd need to refine this definition in order to account for various exceptions (due to convention) or the ways in which the sense is incompletely explained (e.g. it would be "natural" for me to drink water, but "artificial" to manufacture sunglasses).
Words like "natural" and "artificial" don't admit tidy definitions, and you know that, which is why you demanded that I define it for you, presumably so you could poke holes in whatever definition I provided.
> which is why you demanded that I define it for you, presumably so you could poke holes in whatever definition I provided
Not really. Your original use of the word implied the definition you were using, and my comment was merely to point out that it's the wrong definition (in my opinion, obviously).
In this context it makes more sense to include the intention, because the evolution itself in this case is not something we artificially induced.
The elephants, for example, might have evolved to have green tusks instead, which would have made them not attractive to poachers. They could have grown wings that would made them more difficult to be hunted. The point is, poaching might be artificial, but the elephants responded to a threat (coming from humans or not) with a completely random and natural process.
> Not really. Your original use of the word implied the definition you were using, and my comment was merely to point out that it's the wrong definition (in my opinion, obviously).
That's precisely what I said... you asked me to provide the definition in order to poke holes in it. Rather than go through this back-and-forth nonsense with implications, why not just say it up front?
Anyway, seems like you think I was saying that the evolution was artificial. Evolution is heritable variation and the forces that choose among those variations. Natural selection, artificial selection, and genetic drift are possible forces that choose the variation, but in this case, the variations themselves are still random mutations.
