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19 human beings. Yet rather than adhering to a hollow understanding of autonomy, this socionatural promiscuity should be accepted, not resisted. It is time to move beyond a definition of nature that relies on the absence of any trace of human influence. History, rather than ontology, is the proper guide for understanding nature today. Soper's (1995) well-known distinction between a deep and a shallow nature is relevant in this context. Whereas the former refers to the causal powers and struc- tures that operate constantly in the physical world and are the condition for any human intervention in the environment or the biological realm, the latter is the nature of our immediate experience in everyday life: animals, the natural environ- ment, our bodies, material resources. On his part, Birnbacher (2006) distinguishes nature in a genetic sense from nature in a qualitative sense. The former refers to the moment of nature's coming into existence without human intervention, whereas the latter alludes to the appearance of natural forms, which can be, and actually are, affected by human beings. Genetic nature's description is historical, whereas qualitative nature's description is phenomenological. Therefore, nature as an ahistoric essence is not the same as nature as an historic process. Yet what is more telling, the constraints exerted by the former or our interactions with the latter? The historical process involved in such interactions is one of hybridization, that is, the environmental recombination that results after humanly originated pro- cesses and artifacts have exerted a variable degree of influence on natural beings and processes. Karafyllis (2003) has used the term biofact to name those entities whose origin and formation has been anthropogenically influenced, directly or indirectly, irrespective of the actual visibility of that influence. This influence may be intentional and straightforward, as much as nonintensional and indirect: take synthetic biology as an instance of the former, anthropogenic climate change as an instance of the latter. And take the Anthropocene as the category that tries to describe the overall outcome of this long process—which also includes the con- stant, pervading influence of historical nature on society. However, neither naturalness nor hybridization are absolute categories. On the contrary, they are relative ones—depending on the degree of human influ- ence exerted upon each biological process, natural being, or ecosystem. As a result, apart from the trivial sense in which everything can be said to be 'natu- ral', it seems more fruitful to think of nature as a gradable concept, insofar as it is a gradable reality. Besides, as Baertschi (2012) remarks reflecting upon artificial life, biotechnologies are moving the line separating the natural (what is grown) and the artificial (what is made)—a distinction, he adds, that we take as onto- logical and thus morally significant, whereas it should probably be understood as moral but lacking ontological consequences. The opposition between the natural and the artificial is then to be conceived as a continuum: a fluffy dog is at one extreme, a wild dog at the other, while the middle is occupied by domesticated, purposefully crossbred, and genetically modified ones. Different degrees and types of intervention thus express different kinds of socionatural interactions. In order to determine how natural a being or 2.1 The Intricacies of Nature