Why metaphors are bad

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It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools. The painting was very Escher-like, as if Escher had painted an exact copy of an Escher painting.

Instead, go for fresh metaphors that enlighten rather than distract. Metaphors like that are as welcome — and as rare — as respect and civility in a presidential debate. Email Address. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. For example: The grew on him like she was a colony of E. Her eyes twinkled, like the mustache of a man with a cold. Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever. The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do. The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object. It's a fair point, sometimes you want to feel that such things are untouchable, unknowable.

But the simple truth is that scientists themselves constantly make use of analogies, metaphorical devices, and similes. Sometimes it's the only way to build an intuition for a problem, by relating it to something else - Richard Feynman was perhaps one of the greatest players of this game, turning spinning plates into cutting-edge quantum physics and Nobel prizes. I've also had critical eyes express dislike for anything that smacks of anthropomorphism - the ' pathetic fallacy ' of John Ruskin.

Black holes are not, they complain, allowed to be 'monsterized'. Galaxies can't experience painful disruption, planetary systems can't be spoken of as disheveled entities or family members. Well okay, but since prehistory humans have sought to relate to the world around themselves by finding anthropomorphic connections. Is it scientific? No, not particularly, but what are we to do, just shrug and separate ourselves from the entire natural world - them and us?

As a working scientist I actually don't have any problem with the notion of making mental labels for natural phenomena that include some degree of personality. I like my black holes fearsome and my interstellar gas thin and frail. It may well be that in doing so one reinforces a certain blinkering, but we're not all Mr Spock, we need structures, we need something to hang on to - as long as we remember to let go occasionally.

And here's the crux. If scientists need something to grasp at, what about the rest of the world? Quantitative reasoning and scientific knowledge is not everyone's forte, nor is it in everyone's daily experience a fact that we might bemoan, but it is the truth. If a metaphor gets it even half right and if it triggers someone's imagination, that's not bad in my opinion.

Of course it can sometimes backfire, confusing more than elucidating, and even swaying scientific thought in unwanted ways - a point nicely discussed by Philip Ball back in But so it goes, human language is imperfect, and the human brain is imperfect. In ever new variations, scientists employ experiences from everyday life to understand scientific phenomena. Though the use of metaphorical language in science has been historically criticized by some philosophers of science and scientists on the grounds that metaphors are figurative, ambiguous, and imprecise, their generative potential cannot be ignored.

It is, in fact, metaphor that makes theory possible, and a great number of scientific revolutions have been initiated through novel comparisons between natural phenomena and everyday experiences 3. Metaphors in biology and ecology are so ubiquitous that we have to some extent become blind to their existence. While we may not be able to conceptualize, or communicate, abstract scientific phenomena without employing such metaphors, we must also recognize their limitations, as well as their potential to constrain interpretations of natural processes.

In many ways, the metaphors we rely upon may uphold and reinforce outdated scientific paradigms, contributing to public misunderstandings about complex scientific issues. Critics argue that conceptualizing the genome as a blueprint or variations such as codes or instructions is deterministic, oversimplifies complex gene-gene and gene-environment interactions 10 , 25 , and is, in many ways, incompatible with recent advancements in the fields of developmental biology and epigenetics Yet this is not the case.

Often, single genes can, and do, direct multiple phenotypic outcomes through epigenetic processes that are responsive to the environment. This concept of variable phenotypic responses to environmental conditions, or plasticity, has become an increasingly important framework for understanding not only how organisms develop, but also the role of genes in initiating evolutionary change.

Our metaphors, however, have not kept up with recent advances in scientific understandings. Accordingly, this has led some biologists to reject the blueprint metaphor and offer up new ways of conceptualizing the nature of genes A recipe might make more sense as an analogy.

Take bread baking, which combines making something with growth, the growth of the yeast that gives bread its rise. The same recipe under different circumstances gives you different breads. Use a flour from a wheat grown in one part of the country and you have a different mineral composition than that from flour grown somewhere else.

Bake on a humid day and you get a heavier bread than you would on a dry day. Bake on a hot day and it rises faster and has bigger airholes. Bake the same recipe every day for a week, and no two loaves will be exactly the same: the web, that distinctive pattern of holes, will vary from loaf to loaf. While the recipe metaphor is useful in that it provides new ways of envisioning gene-environment interactions, it is not without problems.

Some critics point out that it differs little from that of the blueprint metaphor, other than appealing to different personal experiences and triggering different gendered associations Survey, interview, and focus-group data collected by Condit et al. In the United States, many of the metaphors we use to talk about topics in biology and ecology are competitive and militaristic e.

Our choice of words not only reflects deep cultural cosmologies and historical influences 2 but also reinforces cultural norms, ideologies, and beliefs. Though metaphors are indispensable tools for communicating science, they are sometimes misleading to the general public and can be easily exploited in attempts to further social and political agendas Since the 17 th century, mechanical metaphors have been used extensively by scientists to make sense of nature Part of the appeal of the machine-based analogies that emerged during the Scientific Revolution resided in their perceived compatibility with religious beliefs.

Machine metaphors allowed for religious speculation and inferred an inescapable conclusion: that a designer or creator must exist for all machines have a maker. Though the vast majority of working scientists today reject design as an explanation for scientific processes, they nonetheless still rely on mechanical metaphors to understand and communicate the natural world. As a result, science education is rife with machine-based explanations and imagery that may inadvertently foster teleological thinking in students and the public.

Militaristic metaphors are abundant not just in popular articles on invasive species, but also in the scientific literature 2. Despite debates over what constitutes an invasive vs. Popular metaphors in biology and ecology are also windows into a culture of science that is deeply rooted in hegemonic norms and values that are perpetuated through both the process of scientific inquiry and science communication 30 , When metaphor choices are not appropriately vetted with careful social, political, and historical considerations in mind, they may subtly contribute to the alienation of individuals and groups.

Equally as problematic is the persistent use of other anthropomorphic analogies harems, castes, colonies, etc. Such analogies inadvertently legitimize systems of dominance and hierarchy, reproduce racial and gendered stereotypes, and may perpetuate dehumanizing colonial representations of historically subjugated groups Remnants of colonialism also echo within scientific discourses through the use of metaphors that equate the practice of science itself with penetrating the unknown, conquering nature, and pioneering new frontiers 30 , In light of these observations, some scholars have attempted to generate new metaphors that are more inclusive and less alienating to individuals whose identities and experiences do not align with perceptions of the culture of science.

She argues that if the metaphors we used to talk about science acknowledged the communal, craft-like aspects of scientific endeavors, we might imagine the process of science in productive new ways that are less alienating to traditionally marginalized groups.

Much more research is still needed in examining the role of science-related metaphors in activating stereotypical representations of how science is done, and by whom. For all of their problems, metaphors are indispensable tools for both practicing and communicating science.

No metaphor is perfect, and incongruities between target and source meanings are unavoidable. Some metaphors, however, may be more or less constraining when it comes to conceptualizing complex scientific issues.