Metaphors Involve Values

Language-users always have choices about how to say something; every idea can be expressed in multiple ways. Sometimes, institutional norms or expectations are so strong that those choices don’t seem to exist, because in practice, everyone makes the same choices. Talking about CRISPR as a gene-editing technique is a good example. (So is the acronym-turned-common-name CRISPR itself!) In such cases, you may not recognize either that you’re making a choice or that your choice relies on and reinforces particular values. In other cases, when you must actively choose between one of multiple possible ways to express something, you might not recognize that values are involved in how you make that choice.

We rarely stop to think about how values and language intersect, and that’s a good thing. Conventions—standard ways to express things—let communicators and audiences alike get on with life. We can’t and don’t need to think carefully about everything all of the time. Just as with other habits, like taking the same route to work every morning, language habits free up mental space for other tasks.

Most language choices aren’t controversial. “CRISPR” prioritizes a particular description of a biological phenomenon that emphasizes its packaging and use as a molecular biology technology, along with the authority and priority of the scientists who developed and named it—all very sensible. It’s reasonable to assume that these values are widely shared within and even beyond the molecular biology community.

But, of course, some values aren’t widely shared. And, some conventional choices reproduce systemic inequalities, built into language that we’ve inherited, but now misaligned with values that we might explicitly espouse.

Describing biomolecular relationships in terms of “master” and “slave” molecules is a pretty obvious example, as is choosing to use the pronoun “he” as the default to describe any unnamed scientist. Those conventional choices matter to the big picture of how science develops in making science a less welcoming place for historically enslaved minorities and women and gender-diverse people.

More subtly, conventional choices like “master” and “slave” also reinforce one of multiple possible ways of thinking about biology: that biological relationships are fundamentally hierarchical and binary, with one molecule or other biological entity controlling another. The assumption that biological relationships are best described in terms of control is embedded in biology conventions through and through, from the Central Dogma of molecular biology (“DNA makes RNA makes protein”) to visions for the future of bioengineering that assume that the field’s goal is or should be to exert increasingly perfect control over other organisms.

Describing biology in terms of control isn’t particularly controversial, but maybe it should be. Doing so suggests that sustainability solutions should involve humans—specifically, the subset of humans who think that it’s possible and desirable to control other creatures!—to work to control the behavior of other creatures, to manage environments, to exploit them as resources, etc. This way of thinking doesn’t make much sense for at least three reasons:

• A systems biology view suggests that biological phenomena involve complex, multidirectional, stochastic interactions, not one molecule directing the behavior of one other molecule.
• A social justice view suggests that many Indigenous people understand humans as part of multispecies communities, not directors over other creatures.
• And a problem-solving attitude to global challenges might suggest that we shouldn’t try to resolve global heating and other environmental crises with the same strategies of controlling, managing, and exploiting that contributed to them in the first place. Talking about biology in terms of control—reinforcing the idea that control is just the way biology fundamentally works rather than seeing this as one of multiple possible choices that could be made about how to describe biology—makes alternatives harder to see, harder to discuss, harder to enact.

Because metaphors involve recruiting powerful imagery into structuring how we think about their targets, it’s often good to ask: does this metaphor do the work I want it to do? What other choices are available? Which best aligns with the values I bring to this conversation?

Further reading

• For an example of how two scientists with contrasting values use different metaphors to structure their work, check out Sarah Richardson’s approach to designing biology as domesticating bacteria that have their own interests vs. Tom Knight’s approach as engineering a physical system that’s essentially a very complex computer.
• For an example of how a climate journalist deliberately changed the metaphors she used to better align with her values and the future she wants to help bring about, see Elizabeth Rush’s The Quickening.