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Charles Darwin's Use Of Metaphor In Literature

1653 Words7 Pages

Snow Yu
Professor Antoine
Core 1
03/24/17
Development of Metaphor “Life is like a novel. You are the author and every day is a new page.” This quote is one of numerous metaphors in the world that is used in many genres of compositions. Metaphor is a bit like magic in writing, it allows the writer to have control of two unlike things and combined into a unique sentence. Besides in literature, metaphors are widely used in science, they are the start of new research to new discoveries and it is a way of communicating something that is extraordinary within humans. In a text about using rhetoric and science, Richard Johnson-Sheehan address the main idea of giving an individual interpretation, through looking from the field of science with metaphor …show more content…

This is an easy way to spread this new knowledge and this is the relation that Johnson-Sheehan trying to say that relate to Darwin’s work in “Origin of Species”. Darwin used different wording of metaphor to spread his theory out in public that can be persuasive from his perspective. In one of his chapter called, Natural Selection, he used his own interpretation of nature and mankind, “Can the principle of selection, which we have seen is so potent in the hands of man, apply in nature?” (Darwin, 6). This statement goes hand in hand with Johnson-Sheehan’s view of scientific metaphor, Darwin’s explanation of his idea or his theory made it easy to understand to communicate with the readers. The wording and language highlight the readers and he is relating the common process in nature to the audiences. This allow explanations to be compose that it can be perceived by anyone with little effort. He used metaphor to bring out this new knowledge that people have not known about and this has the power to change perspective and be persuasive to unresolved …show more content…

In scientific discourse, metaphors can be recognized to change scientific theories, conceptions of logical space. When it comes to the Universe that is still yet to discover, metaphors make it easy and helps the society explain the unimaginable place. Every individual use metaphor constantly every day, either from music, arts or poetry, metaphor influences different aspects and connections through one and another. Especially in science, metaphor can come in and makes it easier for audiences to comprehend the principal of the things. In the end of “Metaphor in Scientific Discourse”, Richard Johnson-Sheehan shared his personal thought on metaphor in science. He said, “My hope is that more metaphorical analyses would help us study how various metaphors work in various contexts, eventually allowing us to draw some informed conclusions that are based on the commonalties we observe among these metaphors” (Johnson-Sheehan, 178). This hope is still going on to this day by many curious people, everyday humans need advancement in medical, life, technologies, and this can happen with a start of metaphor to improve the life span. Darwin is one of the person to first talk about evolution and this theory described as descent with modification in life. His metaphors made it to understand growth and is still scientists go back to his theory to process more understanding that are left to discover.

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