An offshoot of realism is called naturalism. A great example of naturalism is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In the beginning, the Joad family are instinctive animals just trying to survive against the powerful forces of society and nature.

The term naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings.

Naturalism is a nineteenth-century literary and arts genre that focuses on the realistic depiction of life and all its struggles. Naturalism is defined by its focus on extreme realism and the idea that one’s environment determines one’s characteristics.

Believers in a supernatural entity (transcendent) are by definition not religious naturalists, however the matter of a naturalistic concept of God (Immanence) is currently debated. Strong atheists are not considered religious naturalists in this differentiation.

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John James Audubon

Natural history is a domain of inquiry involving organisms, including animals, fungi, and plants, in their natural environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study. It involves the systematic study of any category of natural objects or organisms.

As applied to a science the meaning has narrowed as daughter disciplines (like ecology) have gradually split off as distinct disciplines in their own right. In the past the term natural history has denoted the study of anything “natural” and has embraced the study of minerals and fossils as well as living things.

This historical record provides a biodiversity baseline that enables researchers to track geographic and temporal changes in species and communities, and to correlate those patterns with natural or human-related changes in the environment, such as climate change and pollution. Specimens become more valuable over time.

When the phrase was coined, history meant something more like “description”, according to mammologist David Schmidly, and so you could view natural history as a description of nature, and naturalists those who describe it, ask questions about the creatures’ origin, evolution, behavior, anatomy and relationships using …

Natural history is the careful observation and inquiry into each piece of an ecosystem; it is the interconnectedness of species and habitat in both space and time.

Natural history is the study of organisms and the environments in which they live. This is a diverse and exciting subject that covers the study of animals, plants and their environments, along with earth and environmental sciences.

Scientific natural history, which addresses all biological aspects of individual species, one species at a time, then compares many together, is as important to science as any of the umbrella biological disciplines. Research is conducted in the laboratory or at the blackboard rather than in the natural environment.