Is life a battle?

The famous essayist Susan Sontag thoughtfully criticized militaristic metaphors for illnesses and medical science. Yet our participant draft texts this month both made compelling cases—in very different ways—that science maybe does involve fighting.

Is battle an appropriate metaphorical framework when communicating about science?

Morphogens fight it out

The first text we workshopped, about how morphogens work during embryonic development, came to life as an experiment in conceptualizing basic developmental biology as a war of competing cellular impulses. The text began, rather grimly, like this:

Have you ever wondered why you sometimes feel so devastated? Why out of nowhere you feel as if you are wandering across a battlefield? Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you are? That your body is the battlefield of the most powerful forces in embryonic development that have been fighting for the predominance over your body before anyone would even have been able to describe it as a “body”?

We might automatically see this kind of metaphorical writing as only an exercise in “science communication”—a way to help non-scientists understand science. However, the author, herself a scientist and also a fiction writer, noted that this exercise seemed to help her understand and remember the science involved.

This suggests that what kind of metaphor we use isn't the only question. We could also consider whether creative ways of describing science—using basic everyday concepts—might be not just an aid to help non-scientists, but perhaps inherent to science itself. Are there pros and cons to thinking this way?

Here’s a provocative quote from Albert Einstein:

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. It is for this reason that the critical thinking of the physicist cannot possibly be restricted to the examination of the concepts of his or her own specific field. He or she cannot proceed without considering critically a much more difficult problem, the problem of analysing the nature of everyday thinking.

Politicians butt heads

The second text we workshopped also depicted a war of competing interests, but this time it was a fictionalized conflict between political operatives fighting over climate policy, from the forthcoming English translation of the novel Call of the Bluebirds. It was a hair-raising reminder that communicating science is only the first step—then comes the battle to influence policy.

A sobering example indeed that the nature of everyday thinking is, as Einstein said, a difficult problem.

Image: Andres Ramos, Vecteezy