An example of the use of analogy drawing upon scientific ideas,
"…the argument against the critical point theory might be more precisely phrased in terms of a complaint that it derives form an inappropriate choice of time scale, a time scale whose basal intervals are too large for a refined analysis of recent evolutionary history, in the same way as a biologist foolish enough to study human maturation with decades as his [or her] interval would see adulthood as a sudden transformation of childhood and miss adolescence altogether.
…The fact that chimpanzees do not talk is both interesting and important, but to draw form that fact the conclusion that speech is an all-or-nothing-at-all phenomenon is to collapse anywhere form one to forty million years into a single instant of time and lose the whole pre-sapiens hominid line as surely as our biologist lost adolescence. Inter-specific comparison of living animals is, if handled with care, a legitimate and, in fact, indispensable device for deducing general evolutionary trends; but in the same way that the finite wavelength of light limits the discrimination possible in physical measurements, so the fact that the closest living relatives of man are at best pretty far removed cousins (not ancestors) limits the degree of refinement in the measure of evolutionary change in the hominid line when one confines oneself entirely to contrasts between extant forms."
Clifford Geertz (2000) The growth of culture and the evolution of mind (first published 1962), in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays. 2nd Edition. New York. Basic Books
Geertz alludes to the phenomena that the discrimination possible using radiation is limited by the wavelength. The optical light microscope, with its inherent limitation on resolving power, cannot detect structures that can be imaged with an electron microscope, for example.
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