The hard part of science is the information. Getting the information, retaining it, and and evaluating it.
I was tutoring a woman who had applied to Yale as some sort of post graduate something or rather. Her specialty was Microbiology-Biochemistry. She was studying all the different kinds of things that make proteins. She knew the differences between them and she explained to me the research she had doing to name identify the different protein stuff. I cannot remember it, I keep trying, even as I'm writing this, but it's gone.
What would have been easier to remember was something like: The amino acids are like letters, and the words they spell are proteins.
But I wouldn't want to know this, not before I had grasped the actual amino acids and the actual proteins.
The metaphors can help us understand the information, but they are also highly likely to warp our understanding of the information, as the metaphors excludes certain content of the targeted information and relates it more to that which it is being compared to.
How many science lectures have I heard that started with a suggestion to "Think of X as a computer". Think of the universe as giant machine. Think of the brain as a giant information system. Think of ants as soldiers.
What inevitably happens is that the analogies dominate the information. We end up arguing over mechanism and vitalism, nature and nurture, dynamism and reductionalism, nominalism and realism.
In fact, direct reference to the book of nature, that is, empirical understanding, are what allows us to transcend imposing metaphors.
The more we know about the brain, the more we can see that it, in fact is like a big chemical soup, is like a computer, is like an organ, is like a hormone factory, is like a big machine, is like a soul, etc.
The more we know about the brain, the more we can stop thinking of is like and deal just with the actual neurons, actual structures, actual astrocytes, glial cells, dendritic branches, and all that.
I recently watched a discussion between Richard Dawkins and Steven Rose wherein the issues of disagreement were not so much clear to either party, but there was a hint that Rose felt Dawkins and the socio-biology type scientists over simplified DNA and genes, isolating the gene as the point of everything, and excluding the emphasis on the whole biochemical environment. Dawkins response was something like "Yes it's all very complicated, but..."
Dawkins insists that the code is the one thing that goes on and that's the key to natural selection.
But, I think naked contemplation of the processes is still more valuable than such metaphors of keys.
The metaphors we develop or that occur to us, are just ways to grasp the phenomena in different schemes of organization or causaality. But, in the end, unless we are constantly referring to the phenomena without metaphors and analogies, than we run the risk of subordinating the information to the analogy.
It is at this point that we diverge from science. Each scientific paradigm grows overreaches itself, denies information and is replaced by another paradigm.
What is left is information about processes. The animalcules identified by Van Looewnhoek were real, the problems faced by early French evolutionists were real, though much of their conclusions were wrong. The practical uses of electricity were understood faster than the actual phenomena underlying it.
What piles up over the decades and centuries is information, information regarding processes. Whatever metaphor we find useful to give this information a certain structure in a given age should never be taken as more significant than the information. Metaphors, such as the selfish gene, the brain-computer, the god center in the brain, and a gay gene should understood as a way of getting fresh perspective on vast processes, not as some final conclusions that subsume those processes.
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