At the crossroads of science, metaphorically speaking

A small minority of social scientists insist that natural science is nothing more than the subjective interpretation of data in terms of the currently fashionable paradigm. It is an odd idea, and I am not convinced that many of its proponents really believe it, despite what they write in Social Text and other journals. As has been said, you only have to fly in an aircraft to be convinced that there is something real about the knowledge we have gained from science.

Unfortunately, this trivial relativism is too often seen as the only alternative to a more widely held position: that science is a process in which nature poses questions to which there are unique correct answers. Our task as scientists is to find these answers, and we will succeed if only we are clever enough.

This is a false dichotomy. We can agree that science is about reality and makes real progress without believing there are no other major influences on how we choose to observe the world around us. And we do choose: remember Karl Popper's story about going into a lecture room and saying to the students, "Observe!" - to which they naturally replied "Observe what?" Evelyn Fox Keller adopts the middle position. In Refiguring Life, she discusses some metaphors that have been used in 20th-century biology, and argues that these have been much more than mere devices to portray what has been discovered. They have profoundly affected both the questions asked and the answers found.

I agree with this view, but I found this book unsatisfying. It felt like a collection of related points rather than a convincing argument.

Keller begins with a discussion of the domination of biology by genetics throughout most of this century. In her view, the almost total neglect of the role of the cytoplasm was not simply due to technical difficulties. It was also concerned with issues of gender (the cytoplasm as stand-in for egg and the nucleus for sperm), of international conflict, and of "disciplinary politics".

She describes the reawakening of interest in embryology (under its new name of developmental biology) as the "discourse of gene action" was succeeded by that of "gene activation", with the locus of control shifting from the genes to the biochemical reactions of cells in communication with each other.

The book's most interesting part is the discussion of metaphors based on computers, especially the concept of information. This has been an area fraught with problems, largely because in communication theory the concept of information has no connotation of meaning, whereas for biologists it almost always does.

Keller remarks that while some people were using the organism to illustrate a new kind of machine, others were seeking to model the organism after the machines of the past.

Refiguring Life is not an easy read; it may be that the essays made better lectures than reading material. And having contributed some time ago to a volume entitled Evolutionary Processes and Metaphors, I do not find the idea of metaphors in science quite as novel as Keller apparently does. I would still recommend it to biologists, however. It is not very long, it contains some interesting ideas, and it should give them something to think about.

Peter Saunders is professor of applied mathematics, King's College, London.