[via Apothecary] [Via MetaFilter] A classic Stephen Jay Gould essay, The Creation Myths of Cooperstown. Gould compares the real and mythical origins of baseball, as a metaphor for the general human preference for creation myths over messier evolutionary reality. IMOW Causality arising as emergence from complex layers (of what may be underlying scientific simplicity) of reality invariably get expressed in convenient metaphors. The trick is not to forget that real life and language is 99% metaphor. [Metaphors as compression, Lakoff etc.]