Scientists do metaphor

November 18, 2022, by Brigitte Nerlich

Scientists do metaphor

I was idly browsing my Twitter timeline recently (probably for the last time), when my eyes fell on some tweets by Buzz Baum, a cell biologist, saying that he had spoken about metaphor on a BBC radio programme (oh, I thought!) which unfortunately had now been deleted from BBC Sounds (oh no, I thought). He summarised the gist of the programme thus: “We talked about the joy of being a scientist and finding yourself in a new landscape where all your metaphors fail you. ” (oh wow, I thought).

These revelations emerged as part of a conversation between Buzz and Kevin Mitchell, a neurogeneticist, about something that, like so many science things, went somewhat over my head. Anyway, Baum said: “My final thought on the subject: Hsp90 isn’t a capacitor. It’s a chaperone. That’s the problem. ” I know what a chaperone is but that’s about it. The rest was darkness.

Interestingly, Robert Insall, a computational cell biologist asked: “You mean a little old lady who sits all night with your daughter to make sure she can’t get a shag? (almost every word in modern biology is an abused loan with concealed meaning…)”, which set off discussions about the fact that biology is a web of gradually failing metaphors – with contributions by Philipp Ball, a science writer and Jennifer Rohn, a cell biologist and novelist, and a reference to Andrew Reynold’s book Understanding Metaphors in the Life Sciences.

Scientists talk about metaphor

That made me think. I have written in the past about what one may call big metaphors that non-experts can vaguely understand, such as DNA, genomes or genes as maps, books, recipes and so on. But I had never really looked into the practical details of how scientists actually negotiate metaphors in their daily scientific lives (with one slight exception where I looked at how they talk about gene editing. ). How could I find out? I rummaged around a bit on the internet and found a little gold mine.

Pictures, ladders and a bit of Wittgenstein

“A couple of years ago (2nd or 3rd year undergrad) I had this harmful (or misleading, to be more exact) mental construct for Knoevenagel condensation. I pictured it as the carbonyl being brutally rammed, oxygen first, into the activated methylene group, producing water molecule instantly from the sheer force of the impact. All the while I knew that this was not how the reaction proceeds, but I simply couldn’t help having this mental image. ”

This reminded me of what Ludwig Wittgenstein had said in his Philosophical Investigations, that is, his investigations into language, thought and action: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. “ (Paragraph 115)

Strangely, that is exactly the quote I used once in a blog post on science communication in theory and practice – and it even has a picture of me climbing up a ladder! The point: Metaphors are useful, but at some point, they might have to be discarded.

Metaphors, breakdown and theories

Metaphors, breakdown and communication

Communicating with metaphors is really difficult. I have written before that to create a metaphor you need knowledge or at least awareness of two conceptual domains that you then connect, and to understand metaphors you also need knowledge of that kind, and they never perfectly match. That knowledge is also unevenly distributed between people and between source domain (what you take inspiration from) and target domain (what you want to say/find out about). For example, saying “A wetland is a sponge” works for almost everybody, as almost everybody knows both the source and the target domains, while that is not the case with “Hsp90 is a chaperone”. That works well though in a conversation where people know the topic.

Metaphors and models all the way down

“What’s that you say, you draw Lewis structures? You should think in terms of hybrid orbitals. What? Oh, yes, you should be looking at that protein from an MO [molecular orbital, I think] perspective. Well, aaaaactually, MOs are nonsense…you really need to think in terms of *states*…. I hate to say it, but ‘it’s metaphors all the way down’. We describe everything in chemistry (which is, after all, the study of a bunch of overlapping wave functions) in terms of metaphors, since we can’t actually see any of it, it *isn’t* like springs, or spheres, or balls and sticks, or whizzing electrons, or any of that at some level. You can have simple models or complex models. They’re all models. ” So true!

Scrutinising assumptions

This reminded me of what I had said about Reynold’s ‘metaphors in the life sciences’ book: “Reynolds makes clear that far from being mere decorative devices, metaphors are more like scientific hypotheses. They are always partial and provisional and need to be kept under constant scrutiny and revised when new evidence emerges. They are, I would add, similar to models in being mostly wrong but sometimes useful. When mapping knowledge from a familiar source onto an unfamiliar target, the match is never perfect. There is always a crack. That’s where the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen would say; that’s where science happens. ”

The good, the bad and the true

So, there are metaphors that make you see things in a new light; there are metaphors that plant a picture in your mind that you can’t shift; there a metaphors that help move a theory forward but eventually break down and there are metaphors that are useful in science communication and others that are not.

“I think you can separate them into a 2×2 grid: I: Easy; Explains Lots (good metaphor) II: Hard; Explains Lots (too true to be good) III: Easy; Explains Little (too good to be true) IV: Hard; Explains Little (bad metaphor) Obviously, you want lots of Type I metaphors. You don’t ever want Type IV metaphors (those are the bad ones). Early in our careers, we rely mostly on I and III, and as we become more sophisticated, we lean more on I and II. There’s often an inverse correlation between how ‘true’ a metaphor is, and how easy it is to understand its uses. Good scientists move up and down this ladder, and grow comfortable with holding multiple metaphors in their head at once. ”

And that brings us back to something Buzz Baum said on Twitter: “We think in metaphors. Is there anything that is what we think it us [is]? The important question is when is the metaphor useful and when is it confusing? When is a new metaphor needed? Translation is a brilliant metaphor. As is Transcription. Evolutionary Capacitor, less so. ” Don’t ask me what a capacitor is!

Breaking down is good to do

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