Ocelli

What’s your next historical work on? I’m thinking about the power of metaphor in science and the way it frames and limits how we think about the natural world. I’ve already written about 17th and 18th century approaches to heredity, and the history of the genetics of behaviour in the 1950s. In both cases, scientific progress was limited by the metaphors people used. The early modern view that animals were machines could not cope with hereditary phenomena that combined both blending inheritance and particulate inheritance, and so people simply ignored the problem. 250 years later, the ethologists of the 1950s and 1960s seem to have not picked up on the analogies with cybernetics — feedback loops and so on — that were being used with such effect by the molecular biologists. I want to expand this to a more general analysis of the role of metaphor in science.