I love the way analogies and metaphors stretch your brain into thinking about something in a new way. A good, fresh analogy or metaphor can lend valuable insight into a complex situation. Dead metaphors, on the other hand, are those that have become so common in the language that they’ve lost the ability to spark that instant of confusion, then insight. IT is full of them -- bugs, viruses, worms, etc -- many drawn from biology.
Slashdot pointed to a Q&A with Peter Tippett and Steven Hofmeyr, both longtime computer security experts who both have backgrounds in life sciences. The roundtable discusses how and where IT security and biology converge and diverge. Here’s a snip from the beginning:
STEVEN HOFMEYR: The real advantage of using ideas from biology to improve artificial systems is that they can serve as a useful way of stimulating thought. The ideas might not always be applicable, but they can still give you a lot of power. For example, if you look at immunology and how it might apply to computer security, you start to see how much it has to teach us, because the body that the immune system is trying to protect is a highly complex, highly distributed environment. It’s also one that offers no centralized control. Yet the immune system is still largely effective because it manages to take advantage of some very clever little mechanisms.
The danger, though, lies in trying to use analogies like this where they don’t really fit. For example, the immune system has never had to evolve to the point where it could ensure the confidentiality of your genes, whereas in computer security we need to be very concerned about maintaining the confidentiality of systems. That requirement tends to change the whole nature of the game.
My philosophy has always been to use these biological metaphors and analogies wherever they seem as though they might help to solve a problem—and yet also know to abandon them whenever they don’t seem to offer anything particularly useful. That has been a very powerful approach for me
BTW, if you don’t have teenagers, you may not know that analogies have been removed from the verbal section new SAT. I used to think they were a snap, but then I took the sample test at the Miller Analogy Test site.
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