Editing Human Nature (2001 film) (section)

== Plot ==
Three characters are recounting events from their intertwined lives. Puff, a man who was raised as a chimpanzee in the wilderness, makes a testimony in front of Congress. Writer Lila Jute is giving a statement to the police after her arrest. Deceased psychologist Nathan Bronfman addresses an unseen audience in the afterlife. Their stories are told in [[Flashback (narrative)|flash-back]].

Lila is a woman with a rare hormonal imbalance which causes [[Hypertrichosis|thick hair to grow all over her body]]. During her 20s after a brief [[freak show]] gig, Lila decides to leave society and live within nature where she feels free to exist comfortably in her natural state. She writes a successful book about her naked, savage, happy, and free life in the woods embracing nature. Then at age thirty, strong sexual desire causes her to return to civilization and have her hair removed in order to find a partner.

The partner she finds is Dr. Nathan Bronfman, a psychologist researching the possibility of teaching table manners to mice. Lila and Nathan go hiking in the woods one day. Lila sights a naked man acting like an [[ape]] in the woods who has lived as a wild animal his entire life. Lila discards her clothes and chases him until he's cornered on a tree branch. The man falls off the branch, knocked unconscious. Brought to Nathan's lab, the man is named Puff, after Nathan's French research assistant Gabrielle's childhood dog; a phone call to an unknown person reveals that Gabrielle is actually an American with a fake French accent. First with the help of Gabrielle and later with Lila's help, Nathan performs conditioned reinforcement training on Puff, inculcating him with a veneer of fine manners and high culture, in spite of which Puff still has difficulty controlling sexual urges.

To demonstrate his success, Nathan takes Puff on tour. Puff secretly drinks heavily and patronizes prostitutes. Meanwhile, Nathan and Lila's relationship deteriorates and he is seduced into an affair by a scheming Gabrielle. Eventually Lila decides to take Puff back into the forest to undo his manners training and return him to his natural state.

Lila and Puff live naked in the woods together until found by a threatening Nathan, who is killed by Puff. Lila turns herself in as the murderer and asks Puff to testify on the waywardness of humanity before he returns to his home in the forest after a brief encounter with his biological mother.

After the reporters and spectators leave, Puff comes back out of the forest and gets into a car with Gabrielle (still with a French accent). They drive off to the city to eat, while Puff looks back thoughtfully at the forest. The ending strongly suggests some unexplained collusion between the two, throwing much of the interpretation of what went on before into question.

At the end of the film, there are two philosophical passages read while the credits appear. The first is an excerpt of [[William of Ockham]] from ''Opera Theologica'' in which Ockham explains his theory of intuitive cognition:<ref>Opera Theologica p. 31.</ref>

{{cquote|Intuitive cognition is such that when some things are cognized, of which one inheres in the other, or one is spatially distant from the other, or exists in some relation to the other, immediately in virtue of that non-propositional cognition of those things, it is known if the thing inheres or does not inhere, if it is spatially distant or not, and the same for other true contingent propositions, unless that cognition is flawed or there is some impediment."}}

The second is an excerpt of [[Novum Organum]] by Francis Bacon in which Bacon discusses [[inductivism]]:

{{cquote|In establishing axioms by this kind of induction, we must also examine and try whether the axiom so established be framed the measure of those particulars only for which it is derived or whether it be larger and wider. And if it be larger and wider, we must observe whether, by indicating to us new particulars, it concerns wideness and largeness as by a collateral security, that we may not either stick fast in things already known or loosely grasp at shadows and abstract forms. That we may not either stick fast in things already known, or loosely grasp at shadows and abstract forms and not at things solid and realized in matter."}}