Biological Metaphor

According to Dictionary.com, a metaphor is: "A figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, as in 'A mighty fortress is our God.'" It's a comparison between two things without using "like" or "as." If the quote had said, "Our God is like a mighty fortess," it would have been a simile, not really as powerful is it?

I found a piece on the Internet on the biological metaphor at www.obsolete.com/dug/Bionet.htm which gives some text, which I'll reprint here. Keep in mind there is a link to his book. The page wouldn't come up when I tried to find it. Anyway, here what he says:

A valuable conceptual break-through, in the understanding of the Internet and the World Wide Web, can come about if, instead of looking at the Internet as a communication media, we looked upon it as an information environment very similar to a biological environment.

This may seem strange, but, the modern trend in molecular biology is to treat biological processes as a form of information processing.

With this new way of looking at biology - where molecules are seen as packets of data , cells seen as miniature computers and DNA considered to be digital storage devices - the abstraction of a biological environment maps across perfectly well to the environment of the Internet.

As we shall see later, there are many remarkable similarities between the information landscape of the Internet and biological environments and when abstractions of different kinds of systems are similar it becomes perfectly valid to use one as a metaphor for the other.

From a biological perspective, the Internet, with its substance consisting of hundreds of thousands of computer, can be viewed as fertile virgin soil: a fresh environment, where organic-like structures are free to form and evolve to create a new kind of eco-system.

This is more than just a novel way to look at the Internet, the implication is that all the vast knowledge and tools developed over this last century for understanding and controlling biological forms and structures can be brought to bear in helping us to understand the exact nature of this phenomenon we call the Internet and the World Wide Web.

In particular, we can call upon the tools and conceptual models developed for understanding and explaining the complex world of evolution. We can call upon the modern developments in molecular biology: where the break-throughs which have come in understanding the processes within the human cell will give us insights into developing and using the Internet. It is strange, but true, that the research now being carried out to help us defeat the aids virus is likely to be of great value in helping us design new product for the Web.

In the world of biological landscapes, the most successful structure to have evolved has been the cell. Enclosed within its confining membrane, the cell contains a vast library of genetic instructions (DNA), together with the machinery (mitochondria, etc.) to interpret and act upon those instructions. In this way, a single cell can multiply and turn its clones into a myriad of different little factories and data processing units whose combined interactions can create complex self replicating life forms; the variety of which defies all imagination...

In the landscape of natural biology the resultant product of cell processing is a life form. In the landscape of the Internet and the World Wide Web the resultant product will be... an AVATAR.

The point for us is that the biological metaphor has produced a lot of thinking about self-organized systems. This offers a very useful set of tools to help us think about our businesses. We know about hierarchy. We want to think of how our businesses work when viewed as self-organizing systems.

Regarding metaphors, there are metaphors for our lives. Regarding the recent political campaign, Obama is organizer. He scoped out his community (country) crafted an organizational strategy and message to tie them together, and applied those organizational skills to the campaign. The right metaphor for McCain is a fighter pilot. He flew around and dropped bombs on people. That just about summed up the campaign.

What metaphor describes you? What do you think about this? Are you interested in it? Come post a comment.

Entrepreneurship informs all of my professional activities. For entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com