| This dissertation proposes a model of how metaphors interweave biology and society and then examines it using three case studies. The model invokes three broad phases to illustrate how biologists adopt, and then eventually abandon, socially-resonant metaphors that constitute their work. In phase 1, biologists personify nature in accord with the prevailing way that people within their society understand the world. Consequently, these global metaphors carry everyday cultural associations and values that act as relatively unconscious research assumptions. In phase 2, self-perception shifts or the social costs of a metaphor become apparent, causing people to question it despite its epistemic benefits. By phase 3, however, these benefits have declined relative to social costs, so biologists abandon or transform the metaphor, perhaps embracing a new one.; I explore the adequacy of this model with three case studies of pervasive metaphors in evolutionary and ecological discourse. I first consider progress and competition, two global metaphors adopted by biologists at about Darwin's time that were seriously questioned in the twentieth century. Drawing on a web-based survey with 2000 respondents, I show that evolutionary biologists, evolutionary psychologists, biology teachers and members of a spiritual organization, the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, evaluate these metaphors in accord with the model. While they discounted both the empirical support and social benefits of progressive metaphors (Phase 3), which were questioned earlier in the century, they felt that competitive metaphors were empirically justified despite their potential social costs (Phase 2). Respondents' religiosity and political conservativeness explained some of these results, but their faith in evolutionary knowledge most strongly accounted for their rejection of progress and acceptance of competition. Using a text-based, cognitive linguistic analysis, I then investigate a third, more recent case, the reliance upon endemic militaristic metaphors within contemporary invasion biology, where potentially negative social implications remain difficult to perceive and are reviewed here (Phase 1). These case studies elucidate the complex web woven by biological metaphors, yet they also raise crucial questions about the trade-off between epistemic and social benefits, and the extent to which scientists need to consider the latter. |
