What are metaphors (for)?
October 13, 2023
I have been thinking about metaphor for a long time. But I have never brought my core thoughts together in one place. Here we go… and of, of course, they are not just my thoughts…they are inspired by a myriad of thinkers from the 19th century onwards, including, of course, George Lakoff and all those …
Evelyn Fox Keller (1936-2023)
September 25, 2023
On 22 September 2023 Evelyn Fox Keller sadly passed away at the age of 87. She had been a theoretical physicist, a mathematical biologist, a feminist philosopher, a historian of science, and an inspiration to many across these fields. She integrated insights from all these fields creatively and critically, and, most importantly, she added some …
Crumbling buildings: Metaphors we live in
September 8, 2023
Metaphors are ways to make something abstract concrete…. You know where this is going….. Metaphors make us see something as something else, for example life as a journey or institutions as buildings and failing institutions as crumbling buildings. In September 2023 this latter metaphor spread like wildfire. RAAC (and ruin) Our Department for Education here …
Metaphors in science communication: Hits and misses
August 11, 2023
At the beginning of August, various scientific announcements whizzed past me on Twitter. First, a new room-temperature super-conductor (LK-99 for short), which I just dismissed in my head as hype*, then a new pill that cured cancer, which sounded a bit more plausible. In news coverage of both announcements, the phrase ‘holy grail’ came up, …
Gravitational waves, music and metaphors
July 7, 2023
On Thursday, June 29, 2023, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves or NANOGrav announced evidence for gravitational waves emitted by pairs of supermassive black holes across the universe or, in the words of the astrophysicist Katie Mack: “We’re using RADIATION JETS from DEAD STARS to detect RIPPLES IN SPACE from the COLLISIONS OF …
Gene editing, gene shears and other titbits from the history of genetic engineering
April 7, 2023
I was wondering what to write about. In past blogs, I have done quite a bit of ‘conceptual history’ about metaphors or phrases like ‘imaginaries’, ‘tipping points’, ‘deficit model’, ‘trickle down economics’ and even ‘gene surgery‘ and ‘gene drive’. I have also written a few posts about gene editing or genome editing. But, come to …
Chatting with a chatbot about metaphor
March 31, 2023
A week ago my son sent me a link to a tweet in which Ethan Mollick did a little experiment with one of the currently fashionable AI chatbots, a common pastime nowadays. He asked “Bing to look up Tamarian, a made-up Star Trek language that works entirely by metaphors to Tamarian history and myth. Then …
Cancer, metaphors and Bond villains
March 3, 2023
There are metaphors that utterly change how we see the world and there are metaphors that change how we see microscopic bits of it. There are metaphors that are constitutive of theories in philosophy and science and there are more ephemeral ones that provide glimpses of new phenomena. I am just reading a book by …
Can metaphors hinder scientific progress?
February 24, 2023
This is a guest post by Jack Morgan Jones. He is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Manchester’s Philosophy Department with an interest in truth and practical rationality, as well as agency and constructivism. *** It’s readily acknowledged that metaphors can help an educated public better understand a scientist’s technical work. But questioning the …
Gene drive communication: On bombs and bullets
January 20, 2023
In a recent article for Scientific American, the zoologist and author of a recent book on the history of genetic engineering, Matthew Cobb, lays out the pros and cons of ‘gene drive’. Gene drive is a new genetic technology that could be used to wipe out whole species of insects that transmit, for example, malaria. …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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