Genetic Metaphors Promote Mistaken Notions About Genes and False Fears and Expectations for Biotechnology (Book Review) (Book Review‪)‬

The Misunderstood Gene, Michael Morange. 185 pp. plus bibliography and index, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2001. (Transl. by Matthew Cobb) Humans use metaphors to visualize what they cannot see or to aid their understanding of things about which they have incomplete knowledge. This is as true in science as it is in humanistic disciplines. For example, metaphorical models for the cosmos have evolved through the centuries to reflect our concepts of the structure of the universe. Now instead of envisioning stars and planets on rotating crystal spheres packed one inside each other like a set of Russian dolls after Eudoxus (4th century BCE), we imagine the expanding universe as a loaf of rising raison bread or as artist-physicist Jean-Pierre Luminet's hyperdimensional, dynamic space filled with "plunging, interpenetrating and vertiginous illogicalities" (Kemp, M. Nature 426: 232, 2003). Similarly, genes and their significance in specifying morphological, physiological, behavioral, and intellectual traits in plants and animals, including humans, have been represented metaphorically.