This post was supposed to be about metaphor, but my mind has been hopelessly hi-jacked by the fruit fly genome. Metaphors are dangerous.
I started in a fascinating first chapter extract from Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor by Ted Cohen. This is terrifically interesting. I highly recommend reading the whole thing (it’s not very long) as my quoted bits don’t really get to the core of what he’s saying.
There is mystery at the heart of metaphor. During the past several years a number of capable authors have done much to clarify the topic, and they have shown that some earlier central theses about the nature of metaphor are untenable. What they have shown, in particular, is that the import of a significant metaphor cannot be delivered literally, that is, in general, that a metaphorical statement has no literal statement that is its equivalent.
It may or may not be prudent to regard the import of a metaphor as a meaning. If it is, then a metaphorical sentence has two meanings, one literal and one metaphorical. If not, then there is only one meaning, the literal meaning, and the metaphorical import has to be understood in another way. But in either case there will be a metaphorical import that a competent audience will grasp. How the audience does this is, in the end, a mystery.
… My topic is the phenomenon of understanding one another, and, as noted earlier, it may seem dubious to connect this topic with the topic of metaphor. I do not know to what length the comparison can be kept salient, but I make the comparison, provisionally but also polemically, for this reason: the creation, expression, and comprehension of metaphors must involve speaking and thinking of one thing as another. I am persuaded that understanding one another involves thinking of oneself as another, and thus the talent for doing this must be related to the talent for thinking of one thing as another; and it may be the same talent, differently deployed.
Again, I hope you’ll read the rest of the chapter. [ link ]
I’ve been thinking about the above for a few days, so it clicked with the conclusion at the bottom of an article on The New Scientist, Bye-bye boojums: Scientific names lose their sparkle by Richard Webb (Dec 27, 2008). The piece is about the creative names that have often been given to scientific items:
As memorable as such names are, they can prove problematical too. Take the mammalian gene Sonic hedgehog, which acquired its name from the related fruit-fly gene. It is now known to play a role in a developmental disorder of the brain known as holoprosencephaly. The name does not help when parents have to be told that a mutation in Sonic hedgehog has given rise to their baby’s potentially fatal condition.
“It would be nice to have a system for human genes that was stable, memorable and meaningful at the same time,” says Povey. But that’s impossible to achieve, and ultimately the need for stability — and searchability in gene databases — is winning out. The result is the unpronounceable alphanumeric jumble that is the typical gene name today.
It could be a metaphor for science: ever more complex, ever more impenetrable. The shift may be regrettable, but there is a general feeling that it is inevitable. “I slightly mourn the more whimsical names” says Povey, “but their time was past.”
Within that article, there is a link to Mark Isaak’s site, Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature, that has entire sections devoted to puns and wordplay in scientific naming. It also has a page of the names given to fruit fly genes. From there, I was linked to a page, FlyNome, that gives the stories behind the nutty fruit fly gene names. About an hour later, I returned to consciousness, having become totally, and happily lost in puns, wordplay and fruit fly stories. There’s a message in here somewhere, and I’ll figure it out in a day or so. In the meantime, may I recommend some fruit fly genes for your dining pleasure? They are yummy.
-Julie
