ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the rhetorical side of the controversy between scientific biology and its enemies, and, in particular, the use of metaphor in selling and attacking it. Politics is partly about the way people interpret the physical and moral reality they see around them. Empirical evidence, so important in science, is of much less importance in political argument. In politics, an implication is a consequence that, to some observers, would seem to follow inevitably from some other action or belief, without actually being necessitated by logic or physical connection. Scientific theories and discoveries have implications for the intellectual world outside the laboratory, and those implications have political consequences. The history of science is thus full of fights over implications, sometimes centered on the actual theory, sometimes on the empirical findings, sometimes on the methodologies employed, and sometimes on all three together.
