Biological Metaphor Research Articles

Tourism infrastructures

Tourism is both infrastructured and infrastructuring. Such a claim speaks to a much wider infrastructural turn unfolding within the humanities and social sciences that has sought to take seriously both the material and social strata that undergird our ways of life, what Berlant has called the ‘living mediation of what organises life: the lifeworld of structure’ (2016, p. 393). Conventional understandings of infrastructure often rely upon physical and biological metaphors to contemplate the roads, systems, pipes, cables, connections, buildings, routes, regulations and signs that act as grounds, supports, foundations and substrates that facilitate movement and exchange. Certainly, tourism and infrastructure should be easy bedfellows given that infrastructure is primarily understood as the material networks that connect places – that facilitate the mobility of bodies, goods, ideas, data, capital and much more. This paper examines the relationship between tourism and infrastructure as it intersects with predominant geopolitical circulations such as war, security and migration. In considering how the field has addressed this relationship, and where it is going, we contemplate, literally, the roads and verges and other infrastructural formations which are bound up in tourism, but which also signal its more leaky and uncertain boundaries and its contamination with other social and political practices.

Rage against the what? The machine metaphor in biology

Rage against the what? The machine metaphor in biology

‘A movie about flowers?’ Notes on the ecological turn in adaptation studies

Abstract This article takes up and responds to the recent ecological turn in adaptation studies, exploring the discipline’s widespread interest in the overlap between the notion of adaptation in evolutionary biology and the notion of adaptation in literature, film, and media studies. It argues that in order to develop a historically and ecocritically alert approach to adaptation studies, it is necessary to unpack what is at stake in using biological terms and paradigms to study adaptation in art. Firstly, it offers a survey of several studies that have explored the overlap between adaptation in nature and adaptation in culture, arguing that these have been overly influenced by the notions of neo-Darwinism that were popularized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976). Secondly, it offers a rereading of the film that has become a primary case study among theorists who have reached for biological metaphors to explain cultural change: Adaptation (2002). It argues that whereas scholars have often tended to use Adaptation as a springboard from which to launch an exploration of the purported homology between adaptation in nature and adaptation in art, in fact, the film’s evolutionary themes are clearly historicizable, tied to a set of values coordinated around ideas of heteronormative reproductivity, dissemination, and growth. Examining those values helps to demonstrate how the film’s evolutionary themes are deployed as part of its representational strategies, thereby challenging the idea that they might be unproblematically used to describe the overlap between adaptation in biology and adaptation in art.

Paul Feyerabend’s Contribution: The Anarchic Sunset of the Philosophy of Science

Abstract: The author places Feyerabend's contribution within a line of thought on science that ideally opens with the Wienerkreis, and which in some way ends with Feyerabend. This trend has always been based on a series of demarcations, ranging from the opposition between meaningful and meaningless statements (the Vienna Circle), or between scientific and non-scientific statements (Popper), or between normal and extraordinary science (Kuhn), to the demarcation between progressive and regressive research programs (Lakatos) — up until Feyerabend, the former student of Popper, who puts an end to the perspicuity of every demarcation. The conclusion that “anything goes” when it comes to doing rigorous science marks the clearly unsuccessful conclusion of this large-scale historical trend. Philosophical attention thus shifts from descriptions of the scientific method to an analysis of the concrete historical production of scientific ideas and discoveries, in a movement that rehabilitates a Hegelian, historical approach in the empirical sciences.
 The author outlines the contemporary approach that no longer sees the whole of knowledge and scientific practice as a series of methodologies aimed at faithfully mirroring nature, construing it instead as a thought-constituted organism subject to Darwinian criteria of selection and mutation. The biological metaphor of the organism that survives by adapting to external reality replaces the claim to foundational scientific validity on the basis of a priori paradigms.

Transculturation and the porosity of cultures: Fernando Ortiz

AbstractFernando Ortiz introduced his account of transculturation to replace Melville Herskovits’s notion of acculturation as a way of describing the historical contact between cultures. Ortiz understood the idea of acculturation to be promoting a kind of assimilationist model very different from what he witnessed in his native Cuba. Transculturation conforms neither to the model of cosmopolitanism promoted by Kant’s universal history, nor to the kind of multiculturalism that is rooted in Herder’s rival approach to history. Instead, it presents a concept of cultural contact and cultural transformation that highlights the way the material and economic conditions of social existence shape the institutions in which cultures more narrowly conceived are embedded and relate to each other. By bringing transculturation into dialogue with the idea of the porosity of cultures initially promoted in 1925 by Walter Benjamin in his essay on Naples, we find a way to free transculturation from Ortiz’s tendency to lapse into biological metaphors with the danger of retaining a reference to cultural purity that he would not endorse. Transculturation, thus revised, recommends itself as a term helpful for thinking about a world shaped by mass migration and the new technological forms of ever more rapid cultural exchange. Properly understood, it promotes a future where openness and sharing are valued over ownership and preservation.

Epic Sock Puppet Theater : artistic tactics for mitigating online disinformation

This case study presents the artistic research and production process for an interactive installation, Epic Sock Puppet Theater (ESPT), that uses artivist tactics to engage with the divisive socio-political content of online disinformation campaigns. The project allows viewers to interact with a dataset of social media posts made by “sock puppets” or imposter accounts used as part of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns so the viewer can become better equipped to recognize disinformation in their own social media feeds, less susceptible to its negative effects and less likely to unwittingly share it. The project is based on inoculation theory, a biological metaphor for building resistance against future disinformation through careful preemptive exposure to disinformation messages, as well as research that found that the revelation of a sock puppet account helped social media users identify other sock puppets spreading disinformation. In this case study, we summarize our research, user testing, and artistic process as a resource for others who may be interested in combining research, art and activism. Through our research and experimentation, we carefully selected artistic tactics, focusing on techniques from Brechtian epic theater to present emotionally and politically charged content that is designed to polarize viewers in a way that allows for critical reflection. The result is an artistic solution to a socio-technical problem: an animatronic sock puppet theater that simultaneously helps to familiarize and distance the public from online sock puppet disinformation, to creatively mitigate its negative effects.

Вызовы Агоры цифрового общества

The article attempts to use the theory of conceptual metaphor to compare distant communicative practices of Ancient Greece and modern times. The author interprets digital communications and social media as Digital Agora, or Agora 2.0. Just as during ancient times the influence of the Agora made the Athenian aristocracy reckon with the demos, the influence of social media has significantly reshaped the modern political process, limiting the former capabilities of the elites. The use of the conceptual metaphor of Agora 2.0 allows the author to clarify similarities in the functioning of open communication systems, within which the mass dissemination of persuasive fake news and/or foreign interference in the electoral process turn out to be essentially insurmountable. Societies have to adapt in order to compensate for the potentially destructive effects of agorocentric structures. According to the author, it is still an open question of whether the Digital Agora will cope with numerous challenges, or whether the trends causing irreparable damage to democratic institutions will prevail. When examining a potential response to the challenges posed by the existence of the Digital Agora, the author makes use of a biological metaphor of an immune response, employing it to analyze most probable scenarios — from a radical ban on the Agora 2.0’s very infrastructure to the introduction of subtle homogenizing institutions that prevent the unchecked growth of populist influence.

Táj és ember viszonya

In this paper I will focus mainly on the biopoetic aspects of Miklós Szentkuthy’s novel, Chapter on Love. In his novel, Szentkuthy creates an intense rhetorical web of biological metaphors and imagery, also elaborates a specific literary language, a unique world of fiction, in which the boundaries between man and nature are blurred or, on the contrary, even sharpened. ™e novel, like many of Szentkuthy’s works, uses a theoretical, philosophical vision to approach the experience of elementary perception. I examine the narrator’s interpretation of the individual’s relationship to the larger biological processes, and how the text creates a kind of visual and rhetorical forest.

Analysis of Teachers' and Students' Perception of the Use of Metaphors in Biology

This study aims to investigate teachers' and students' perceptions of the use of metaphor in learning biology including the effectiveness of and the interest in using metaphor in learning biology. The investigation builds on assumption that metaphor is a potential method to alter the way teachers and students respond to abstract and complex concepts. The data in this study was obtained qualitatively using the triangulation method involving Focus Group Discussion (FGD) with an expert group and individual interviews. The instrument utilized in this study is a discussion guide and an interview guide containing open questions which later was transcribed and analyzed. The respondents of this study are 30 biology teachers and 71 senior high school students from three districts in West Java, Indonesia. The result shows that teachers and students respond positively to the use of metaphors in learning biology concepts. In addition, teachers express that metaphor helps in delivering abstract and complex biology concepts as well as developing creativity in teaching. Meanwhile, students express that metaphor has the potential to help them understand biology concepts, increase interest in learning biology, and build relevance to the concept.

Survivability Design in Hostile Environments

This paper introduces a novel ERP model of survivability design using natural analogies. Management theories frequently emerge from biological metaphors. Every entity seeks to continue existence, to survive. Firms, governments and individuals balance survivability factors of efficiency, resilience, and prominence (ERP) to stay alive. The researchers employ a comparative analysis methodology between squids, military ships, startup firms in the defense industry and strategic supply chains using these analogies and novel ERP model as an analytical framework. Comparing the cases yields general principles of strategic design that potentially extend to other entities that function in hostile environments. These principles primarily relate to the relative significance of threats, the importance of ERP factors, the nature of interrelationships among the ERP factors, and the tradeoffs involved while taking actions to improve survivability. The paper offers insights into the use of ERP analogical case analysis as a means for interdependent entities to co-create strategies to plan for and overcome dilemmas in hostile environments.

The Neuroscience of Literary Time Travel: How Literary Works Cross Historical Distance

ABSTRACT: How do literary works speak across historical distance? When critics attempt to answer this question, they typically invoke biological metaphors that testify to the inability of formal or historical categories alone to explain the mystery of how literary works reach across the boundary between life and death. This essay investigates the embodied cognitive processes that enable literary time travel by undertaking a neurophenomenological analysis of the relation between aesthetic experiences and their neural correlates. A neurophenomenological approach can clarify what eludes formalist and historicist accounts by correlating the intersubjective interactions that constitute aesthetic experience and the transpersonal biocultural processes underlying them. This essay explains how phenomenological theories of reading and aesthetic experience relate to neuroscientific research in four areas: embodied simulation; action understanding; brain-to-brain coupling; and the anti-entropic organization of "free energy" in predictive processing. Correlations between phenomenological theories of consciousness and neuroscientific findings about cognition show how the experience of interacting with past lives as we read is supported by embodied neurobiological processes that are ubiquitous in our everyday cognitive lives and that aesthetic experiences activate and exploit.

What Biological Stories are Americans Telling About the Egg and the Sperm? A Study Inspired by Emily Martin 30 Years Later

Emily Martin’s landmark article— “The Egg and the Sperm” —demonstrated that cultural beliefs about masculinity and femininity led scientists to construct a “fairy tale” romance between active sperm and passive eggs, a biological metaphor that influenced the process of research in scientific labs and descriptions of fertilization in textbooks. In the decades since, there have been significant shifts in cultural beliefs about sex, gender, and sexuality, including challenges to the conceptualization of sex as a binary category, growing social acceptance of a wide variety of gender identities and sexualities, and an increasing proportion of people who subscribe to gender-egalitarian views. While Martin’s focus was on the scientists producing knowledge, here I pivot to individuals recruited from the general public in a northeastern American city, using a sociology of culture approach to ask whether shifting beliefs about gender and sexuality are associated with different biological metaphors about fertilization. Through qualitative interviews (N = 47), I find that the traditional metaphor of active sperm penetrating passive egg is still commonly used, but that another metaphor is also circulating, one that positions gametes as more similar than different, as two halves of a whole. I conclude by discussing the implications for debates about the relationship between biological stories and social beliefs.

An Unsupervised Graph-Based Approach for Detecting Relevant Topics: A Case Study on the Italian Twitter Cohort during the Russia–Ukraine Conflict

On 24 February 2022, the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops began, starting a dramatic conflict. As in all modern conflicts, the battlefield is both real and virtual. Social networks have had peaks in use and many scholars have seen a strong risk of disinformation. In this study, through an unsupervised topic tracking system implemented with Natural Language Processing and graph-based techniques framed within a biological metaphor, the Italian social context is analyzed, in particular, by processing data from Twitter (texts and metadata) captured during the first month of the war. The system, improved if compared to previous versions, has proved to be effective in highlighting the emerging topics, all the main events and any links between them.

The Symptomatological Imagination

Abstract Cultural and literary critics have begun to abandon a long-standing commitment to poststructuralist and deconstructive interpretative methods in favor of an ostensibly Marxist aspiration to comprehend cultural phenomena as symptomatic expressions of a social totality. This essay identifies some of the advantages and shortcomings of this symptomatological mode of interpretation by returning to a dispute in the German scientific establishment around the turn of the twentieth century concerning the applicability of biological conceptions of organic wholeness in cultural and social analysis. The dispute culminates in Max Weber’s nuanced defense of biological metaphors as indispensable heuristic devices for cultural inquiry that can nevertheless result in dangerous consequences when they are inappropriately employed. This essay ultimately argues that Weber’s contribution to cultural analysis remains an underappreciated and vital methodological resource for researchers who wish to rehabilitate the concept of totality today.

Theory of Evolution of Architectural Engineering Based on Biological Metaphor

Theory of Evolution of Architectural Engineering Based on Biological Metaphor

Povampirenje kao zaraza – prvi vojni izveštaji o vampirima i njihovo literarno transponovanje u savremenoj srpskoj prozi

This paper analyses three works of fiction (two novels and one short story) inspired by the first Austrian military reports on vampires. These reports suggest how the discourse about the Other (primitive, barbaric, half-cultivated, etc.), personified in the Serbs, evolved in the Age of Enlightenment. Additionally, the reports have been a source of creative inspiration for a number of literary (re)interpretations of the vampire phenomenon: from postmodern literary entities (mediating an open dialog of the novel, written by M. Novaković, with the entire tradition of the Serbian horror fantasy), through existential studies of the meaning of humanity in the context of the “demonic gift” (the novel by M. Milosavljević), and biological metaphors of disease, to the latest representation of this demonic character as a dark subculture hero existing in the liminal areas of “civilized” space (G. Skrobonja).

The foundational economy-as-an-organism assumption of ecological economics: Is it scientifically useful?

This paper documents prominent biological metaphors in ecological economics and argues that the discipline is founded on an untested assumption, essentially an analogy: The economy-as-an-organism. A transdisciplinary approach is taken to test the scientific usefulness of this analogy, and eight propositions are put forth and examined. Results show that: 1) This analogy bears all the characteristics of scientifically useful analogies, as documented in the relevant literature. 2) World Bank data from 165 countries from 1960 to 2013 show that empirically verifiable laws that apply to all organisms apply analogously to all economies – supporting the ecological economics view that economies and organisms are metabolically analogous. 3) Empirical results affirm those of a mature GDP-energy literature, despite employing very different assumptions and perspectives – thus validating the analogy's scientific potential. 4) The analogy offers a new perspective on economies, correctly predicts their “characteristics,” and generates new testable hypotheses, hallmarks of scientific analogies. 5) New perspectives and predictions relate to sustainability and are particularly relevant to researchers interested in this field – thus satisfying the “goal relevance” characteristic of scientific analogies. All results of this exploratory and conceptual paper suggest that our analogy is scientifically useful and worthy of additional research.

Writing in a World of Strangers The Invention of Jewish Literature Revisited

The question how to frame the world as asingle, objectivesystem that accommodates both oneness and asymmetry,has been a constant in human thought. In an attempt to avoid Westernteleologies, I propose to start at the opposite end and revisit the invention,in the early 1800s, of the small literary subspecies of Jewish literature. As Ihope to show, the Jews’ struggle to write themselves into the European canon highlightsvarious tensions within cosmopolitan literature that are being debated today: themeeting of unity and multiplicity; the nature of intersectionality; the searchfor cosmopolitan aesthetics; and the (im)possibility of inclusion withoutexclusion.Thispaper traces how the early Wissenschaftdes Judentums tried to advance Jewish emancipation by redefining thetraditional canon both in national and in universal terms. The result was aporous and synergetic Jewish literature croisée that was proud tocontribute to a synthetic ‘Totality of Literature.’ Building on Hegel and anticipatingOrtiz’s 1940s concept of transculturation, Wissenschaft authors relied onwater-imagery (confluence) rather than biological metaphor (métissage)to capture the transformative dialectic of cultures in contact. Presentingliterature as a serial global dialogue with alternating hegemonies, theyformulated a multinational rather than transnational aesthetic that bypassedboth monistic and pluralistic models.

Metaphoric Conceptualization of Translation and Translator in Para- and Metatexts: “dead” and “live” Metaphors

Intellectual pursuits in general and in translation particularly cannot be conceptualized without resorting to metaphorical means relating this experience to more perceptible ones. In European languages the metaphor in question is TRANSLATION IS MOVEMENT / RELOCATION. The terms for translation in various European languages (translatio(n), traduction, perevod) all imply the idea of relocation of a physical object. Translatare and traducere, the latter introduced by Italian humanists, find parallels (prēlozhiti and prēvoditi respectively) in Slavic prologues of the period. Although its verbal realization is conventional and even trite now, this conceptual metaphor has survived in lexemes designating the agent, the process and the result of translation activity. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the terms used by several late antique, medieval, and modern translators in their prologues, epilogues, and metatexts on translation, and especially vivid metaphorical imagery that regularly appear in their texts. This fact must not be neglected by translation theory. All the constituents of translation process, namely, agents, source and target texts, translation method, the signifier (lesignifiant) and the signified (le signifié) in the translated text, the process of translation and the life of the translated text in a new culture are discussed metaphorically. The agent of the activity under study (translator) is mostly represented via the metaphor of a master’s (author’s) servant, although sometimes the relationship between the author and the translator is envisioned as a competition or even a conquest. The motivation behind translators’ endeavor is often discussed in terms of the monetary “talent” parable (where talentum is a unit of weight) quoted or alluded to by Aelfric in England and John the Exarch in Bulgaria in the 10th century and Marie de France and Theodosius from the Cave Monastery in Kiev two centuries later. The relationship between source and target texts is illustrated with an artistic metaphor, among others. The signified and the signifier in the text are often presented as a body and clothing or a jewel and its wrappings. The translation process is often shown as that of construction in medieval texts and work of machinery in modern ones. The life of the target text in its new surroundings is discussed through revitalizing the old metaphor of relocation (as the cargo of a ship unloaded onto a distant shore) or through various biological metaphors.

“Poison to the Economy”: (Un-)Taxing the Wealthy in the German Federal Parliament from 1996 to 2016

The concentration of wealth is a key component of the rise in economic inequality at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While the abolition of taxes on private wealth during the 1990s and 2000s is recognized as an important institutional driver behind this development, comparatively little is known about the justification of tax cuts for the wealthy in advanced democracies. This paper investigates how the abolishment of the personal net wealth tax in Germany, a country with high levels of wealth inequality, has been debated and justified in parliament over a period of 20 years. Using a mixed methods approach that combines computational social science methods and a qualitative analysis, we examine how Germany’s two major parties, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD), have variously construed the meaning and purpose of the wealth tax and justified their support for or opposition to it. While the Social Democrats debate the wealth tax primarily from a social justice perspective, the Christian Democrats rely on an efficiency frame that invokes biological metaphors, enabling them to narrate the wealth tax as a threat to the social body. Paradoxically, then, by arguing that the tax is “poison to the economy”, conservative discourse succeeds in linking opposition to the wealth tax to a principle of social unity. On these grounds, we suggest that future research should scrutinize how the interrelation between political discourse and institutional architectures has facilitated the rise of wealth inequality in recent decades.