Thinking of these metaphors as independent attempts at explaining nature is missing what was valuable about them. Their value isn't measured by how successful t

Thinking of these metaphors as independent attempts at explaining nature is missing what was valuable about them. Their value isn't measured by how successful they were at an explanation, they were successful in orienting our thinking towards using lower level mechanism to explain higher level phenomena. But this effort isn't undermined as our understanding of mechanism becomes more sophisticated.