Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution

We look for missing links in the sciences and humanities, but the essential missing link - metaphor - is always in front of us. In Missing Link, Jeffery Donaldson unites literary criticism and evolutionary and cognitive science to show how metaphor has been with us since the beginning of time as a seed in the nature of things.

With examples from centuries of poets, critics, philosophers, and scientists, he details how metaphor is a chemistry, an exchange of energies forming and dissolving, a...