like vs As and adjective clauses

[dfs]

Hi,
I have a question concerning as vs like.
Would this sentence be correct? : More than thirty years ago Dr. Barbara McClintock, the Nobel Prize winner, reported that genes can "jump", like pearls that move mysteriously from one necklace to another

Since the red part of the sentence is a noun phrase in the form of an adjective clause, it "acts" like an adjective. Is my thinking correct or do we count move as an active verb?

All the best, David

[RonPurewal]

I'm going to skip the grammar terms, because I don't know them. (Our other moderators might, if you are concerned with such things; just know that there's no reason to know them for this exam.)

* The grammar of the sentence is fine. There's nothing structurally wrong with it.

* The problem lies in the meaning of the sentence. This sentence is clearly supposed to be an analogy/metaphor, but "like pearls that move..." doesn't imply an analogy/metaphor.
Like just about everything else, this is best explained with examples.
I saw a man working at a bank. --> The man was actually working at the bank when I saw him.
I saw a man who works at a bank. --> I may have seen this man anywhere (a club, a gym, a store... wherever). I know that he works at a bank, but I didn't necessarily see him there.

You can see the problem here. To make a metaphorical analogy, you'd want pearls moving..., which would stress that the actual motion is what's being compared.
Pearls that move, like a man who works at a bank, is just a general statement about what someone or something habitually does. It can't be used to refer specifically to an action or process, as we want to do here.