The human brain seems to have hardware support for thinking in analogies, and I don't think this capability is a waste of resources, even in our highly non-ancestral environment [...] Take the plum pudding atomic model. I still remember this falsified proposal of negative 'raisins' in positive 'dough' largely because of the analogy...

I think this part is really important. It seems like humans really do have hardware for analogies and that leads to better retention of information that you analogize. Of course using analogies to try do derive new information about the original subject is a fallacy (and I think that's where most of the animosity toward analogies on LW stems from), but drawing an analogy is an invaluable tool for understanding and remembering things. It forces you to think things through on a mechanistic level and gives an easy path to retrieval.