An example of an analogy drawing upon scientific ideas:
"The appropriate image, if one must have images, or cultural organisation, is neither the spider web nor the pile of sand. It is rather more the octopus, whose tentacles are in large part separately integrated, neurally quite poorly connected with one another and with what in the octopus passes for a brain and yet who nonetheless manages both to get around and to preserve himself, for a while anyway, as a viable if somewhat ungainly entity.
…A workable theory of culture is to be achieved, if it is to be achieved, by building up form differently observable modes of thought, first to determinate families of them and then to more variable, less tightly coherent, but nonetheless ordered 'octopoid' systems of them, confluences of partial integrations, partial incongruencies and partial independencies.
Culture moves rather like an octopus too – not all at once in a smoothly coordinated synergy of parts, a massive coaction of the whole, but by disjointed movements of this part, then that, and now the other which somehow cumulate to directional change. Where, leaving cephalopods behind, in any given culture the first impulses towards progression will appear, and how and to what degree they will spread through the system, is, at this stage of out understanding, if not wholly unpredictable, very largely so."
Clifford Geertz (2000) Person, time, and conduct in Bali (first published 1966), in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays (2nd Edition). New York. Basic Books.
Read examples of scientific analogies
