I get annoyed at the "baseball-is-a-metaphor-for-life" school of thinking perhaps best expressed by George Will and other enthusiasts. I prefer anti-communist menace Stan Evans' take on baseball, that it's a metaphor for... softball.

Either way, Brother Arnold has a provocative argument about sports and biotech and metaphors:

Like Leon Kass, the Chairman of the Bioethics Council, [Michael] Sandel makes extensive use of sports metaphors. For instance, he writes, "as the role of enhancement increases, our admiration of the achievement fades -- or, rather, our admiration for the achievement shifts from the player to his pharmacist."

However, sports are a peculiar facet of human experience. They are inevitably zero-sum in character. For every winner, there is a loser. Each tournament has only one champion. When an athlete breaks a world record, the previous record-holder's title is eclipsed.

Is the same true of biotech? Is the metaphor legit? I report, you decide.