How Metaphor Has Shaped Science, For Better Or Worse

KATHLEEN DAVIS: This is Science Friday. I’m Kathleen Davis. Here AT SciFri, we’re big fans of metaphors. They can help make complicated science concepts easier to understand, both for the public and for scientists themselves. Take, for example, the Big Bang. That helps us visualize the beginning of the universe. Or we can understand amino acids as the building blocks of proteins.

But as our next guests have shown, these scientific metaphors can also have a dark side. And they can even set research back. Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff are the hosts of the podcast series The World According to Sound. And they’re here to tell us about their new project, An Inexact Science. It’s a special two-hour episode that explores how language and metaphor have shaped science, for better or for worse. Here’s SciFri’s John Dankosky.

JOHN DANKOSKY: Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff, welcome back to Science Friday. Good to have you guys here.

SAM HARNETT: Thanks for having us.

CHRIS HOFF: Yeah, nice to be here.

JOHN DANKOSKY: OK, so first of all, why did you want to do a series about language in science history? I mean, what gave you this idea?

SAM HARNETT: Yeah, I think it’s– what appealed to me is that a metaphor seems, on its surface, the most unscientific thing, right? I mean, when you hear metaphor, you think about poetry, and it’s a, by nature, kind of an imprecise way of expressing things. But when you look back at the history of science, metaphors are integral to some of the biggest discoveries, to even doing basic science.

And I think in a bigger sense, metaphor is a window into how social and cultural forces shape science, everything from what we think science is to how it should be done, to who can do science is shaped by social and cultural forces. And that’s really evident when you start looking at the metaphors we use in science.

JOHN DANKOSKY: It’s interesting too, because I think especially around election years, we think about metaphor in the context of trying to sway people’s opinion and something that’s used in politics an awful lot. But I think, in science, you’ve got to sell your ideas too. And I think metaphors kind of come in handy there.

SAM HARNETT: Right. But the more that we looked at the history of science, the more that you see that metaphor is essential to the theories themselves. And I think evolution is a great example. I thought of Darwin really as this hyper rational scientist who gathered all this data and then came up with this theory.

But in reality, he didn’t have enough data to conclusively prove his ideas. So what he had to do is to craft a story. And so he had all of these data points, and then he crafted a story, and he used metaphor to craft that story. He labored over which metaphors to use. If you look at his journals, they change many times. And things like natural selection or the tree of life or the tangled bank, I mean, these are essential to the theory itself.

CHRIS HOFF: Yeah. And I also just would add that the sheer complexity of so much that’s going on in science, like if you look at, say, a black hole, unless you’re a super advanced mathematician, there’s really no way to make sense of a thing like that. And so you have to use this kind of language that doesn’t make sense to our everyday lives.

And that’s what a metaphor is. It’s just a way to take this really complex idea or phenomenon and put it in language that makes sense to us.

JOHN DANKOSKY: OK. So I’d like to get to one of the words that you look at. It’s the word cell. So some of us might remember from middle school biology that there’s a 17th century scientist named Robert Hooke, and he gave us the name cell. And it was inspired, I guess, by the rooms of a monastery, the place where monks lived, which were also called cells. But there’s more to the story here, right?

CHRIS HOFF: Yeah, the cell is really interesting because it’s the first person to observe them under a microscope, this guy, Robert Hooke. And they structurally looked like a room with four walls, like this four-walled thing. And so he said, OK, I’ll just call that a cell. Of course, over time, we find out more and more and people keep building off this idea. This guy after him, Franz Unger, he starts calling them building blocks.

But like all these words, they’re really inaccurate. A cell is not at all like a room. It doesn’t function at all like a building block. These things are fluid. Things can move in and out of them. It’s actually totally wrong. The metaphor is wrong. And that’s a really good example of a metaphor actually kind of blocking advancement, blocking progress, because we’re thinking about them in this term that it just is not at all. And so that’s like a– yeah, it’s a good example of an inaccurate metaphor actually hindering scientific progress.

SAM HARNETT: I’d also add that there’s this whole history of personifying the cell, which again, comes from this idea of as an individual unit, eventually cells got to be thought of as miniature organisms. And they got sort of ascribed personality as if they were actually the same as an animal, and in a similar way, kind of blocked the idea that they functioned together and collectively.

JOHN DANKOSKY: I think one of the things that I’m so fascinated by is the idea that the metaphor turns out to be completely wrong. It’s not a cell at all, but yet the word persists for hundreds of years. We’ll probably always going to be talking about cells. So why is it so persistent despite its inaccuracy?

SAM HARNETT: I think it’s– two things. One, I think it’s a good cautionary tale. A lot of these metaphors, they can be misleading in terms of research, but they could also have social and cultural biases that have a big effect on what people study and why.

But the second thing I’d add is also it points to the importance of just interrogating the metaphors all the time. I mean, you can’t do science without metaphors. As Chris was saying, you can’t really conceive of a black hole without a metaphor. We need them. And so the story of cell is an indicator that we should constantly be thinking about these metaphors. Are they apt? Are they not accurate anymore? Do they have biases in them?

JOHN DANKOSKY: You actually tell a different story about brain cells called glia. Let’s take a listen.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

– Once glia were recognized as important agents in the nervous system, the metaphor shifted again to masculine ones.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[DRILLING NOISE]

– Construction supervisors, architects, board members, creators and defenders, brain wardens. Lord of central nervous system development. One cell to rule them all.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[END PLAYBACK]

JOHN DANKOSKY: [CHUCKLES] I like, one cell to rule them all. So tell us more of that story.

SAM HARNETT: Sure. So this is based on a wonderful essay by two academics, Meg Upchurch and Simona Vitova. And what they do is they trace the evolution of different metaphors used to describe glia. And glia are cells in the brain like neurons. And at the start, glia were thought of to be nothing more than sort of packing material.

And so the first metaphors were packing material, or waste, or sponge-like cells. But then they realized, oh, these glia are actually kind of doing something. They seem to be helping the neurons. And the neurons are cast as the stars of the show. And so the neurons got the male metaphors. They were the actors and the stars.

And the glia then were given more female-coded metaphors. They were thought of as nursing the neurons or cleaning up after them. They were cleaning the house, right?

CHRIS HOFF: Caregivers.

SAM HARNETT: Yeah, caregivers. And then as they found out more, they realized, actually, these glia are really important, and actually they’re really diverse. And at that moment, that’s when the metaphor shifted back to male metaphors. And as you just heard, they sort of then got these masculine metaphors.

So in this story, your hear inherent sexism. But then also, a lot of these metaphors that were used at certain periods of time, again, they dismiss the glia, and researchers who were sort of disincentivized from working on this unglamorous caregiver or attendant cell as opposed to the star of the show, the neuron.

JOHN DANKOSKY: Chris, I guess I’m wondering if there are some examples of some metaphor that you have learned that really had positive outcomes for science, where the metaphor itself really, really helped us understand something a bit better.

CHRIS HOFF: Yeah, that’s a good question. I have a good sort of negative example of that, but you can kind of flip it and see where the positive would be. I think we did a short little story about how we often talk about diseases, specifically cancer or AIDS or something that’s really kind of horrendous and bad.

And metaphors we almost always use around that are basically war and fighting metaphors. We are battling cancer. I lost my battle with cancer. We have to fight COVID. We’re on the front lines on the battle against HIV. But, I mean, there’s no logical reason why we have to talk about them that way.

And in fact, if you talked about them in a totally different way, there’s a lot of actual science that gets at that you get more positive results. So if you talked about it more of like, oh, I’m cohabitating with cancer, or I’m living with this thing, in the end, my body produced this thing, so why should I be sort of rebelling against it? I should just be living with it. And so you could see if you actually change your viewpoint on the metaphors that you use, there’s actual results where people are getting just better outcomes as a result.

SAM HARNETT: I would add, there’s a story of evolution, which I think evolution would not exist without the metaphors it’s based on. I mean, that’s a big part of Darwin’s work. But one metaphor that we came across that I really liked was the metaphor of quilting. And there was a professor who used quilting as a metaphor to describe the process of science, of doing science, was like stitching together a quilt.

And she wrote this essay about quilting as a metaphor, as a counterpoint to a lot of the aggressive, masculine metaphors that dominate the way we think about science. Science is about discovery and conquering and a lot of things that are coded as masculine. And she wrote this beautiful essay just recasting all of science as quilting.

And it shows the power, again, of if you change the metaphor, it sort of changes the whole nature of how you understand something. Suddenly, science is collaborative, it’s painstaking. It’s this act of like putting together all these different scraps of fabric into something new. It’s not this individually-led conquest. So the idea that one little work is sort of changed the whole way we think about things. And this is not to do science, but it’s how we think about science.

JOHN DANKOSKY: I guess, at the end of all this, did you come away with a couple of, I don’t know, best practices? Because there’s a lot of people who are involved in science and the sciences who listen to this program and probably are listening to this thinking, hmm, there might be a better way to use language in the work that I do that could, I don’t know, help people understand it, help me sell what I’m trying to do. What are some takeaways that maybe you have for the scientific community from what you learned?

CHRIS HOFF: Yeah, I think the first major one would just be to really interrogate every sort of word choice that you’re using, especially when you’re communicating your work. If you’re talking about disease, again, and you’re using battling and war metaphors, you could just think about that and think about the effect that it could have on the reader and just think about also how it’s influencing your own thought about your own work.

SAM HARNETT: And I would add that there is this perception that science is somehow hyper rational and objective in a way that’s very distant from other work in academia, that’s distant from the humanities and social science. And if you look at the history of science, there’s actually a lot of overlap. It’s more of a thing to embrace, to think about the ways in which science is not totally precise and objective and rational.

And in thinking about that, you will, A, recognize times when you make mistakes. But B, I think there’s more things to investigate when you think that way.

JOHN DANKOSKY: And it’s something we’ve covered in the past in the program, but maybe it’s not such a bad idea for scientists to, I don’t know, take a poetry course now and again.

SAM HARNETT: Right, exactly.

JOHN DANKOSKY: Sam Harnett, Chris Hoff, they’re co-producers of the podcast, The World According to Sound. Sam and Chris, as always, great to talk to you guys. Thanks so much for bringing us these stories.

CHRIS HOFF: Yeah, definitely.

SAM HARNETT: Thanks for having us.

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