What I mean is like for example, a person having “gravitational pull” or someone making a “quantum leap” makes no sense to anyone who knows about physics. Gravity is extremely weak and quantum leaps are tiny.
Or “David versus Goliath” to describe a huge underdoge makes no sense to anyone who knows about history, because nobody bringing a gun to a sword fight is going to be the underdog but that’s essentially what David did.
I’m looking for more examples like that.
One of the things I remember most from high school biology is “an organism exists in a state of negative feedback, and when that feedback becomes positive it dies”. It applies to way more than just biological organisms, and is less confusing to laymen than anything about valleys in the space of possible configurations.
More optimal is not only wrong but a bullshit, unnecessarily wordy way of saying “better” in the first place.
Interesting! My last biology class is a tiny speck in my rearview mirror, so I’m not sure that I’m understanding it the way your class meant for it to be understood, but I think that that makes a lot of sense. Too much of one kind of input to a living thing without an output to balance it out can be disastrous.
They meant it in a homeostasis kind of way, not matter conservation. If a cell responds to an increase in osmotic pressure with more osmotic pressure it will not be a cell for very long. Ditto for body heat, hormones, cell growth or any number of other things in a multicellular organism. I guess it was just an interesting, birds-eye way of approaching the topic, and most of the other stuff was not as memorable.