Biology was especially subject to domination by unhelpful arguments from analogy, whereby superficial aspects of plants and animals caused them to be taken as symbols of something else. One of the things most notably wrong with Renaissance thought was the immense proliferation of signs. Though allegory was certainly popular earlier (medieval bestiaries spend a good deal of space on what virtues animals symbolize), it did not so completely create a veil of signs between man and the world as it did in the Renaissance.
