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Oren Harman, "Metamorphosis: A Natural and Human History" (Basic Books, 2025)
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Orin Harman
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Renee Garfinkel
Today we're exploring one of the most ancient, beautiful and perplexing mysteries in nature. Metamorphosis. How does a caterpillar become a butterfly? How does a tadpole turn into a toad? And here is the deeper question. If a living being can change so completely yet still remain itself, what does that tell us about us? Our guest today is Orin Harman, historian of science, biographer of ideas, and author of the new book A Natural and Human History. In this remarkable book, Harman weaves together the biology of animals that transform, the history of how humans try to explain transformation, the personal experience of becoming a parent again later in life, and the philosophical question at the heart of all identity. That is, how can we remain the same while constantly changing? Welcome to the Van Leer Institute series on ideas. I'm Renee Garfinkel. From Aristotle to modern biologists, from sea squirts that digest their own brains to jellyfish that age in reverse in Orrin Harman's hands, the story of metamorphosis becomes a story about the human soul. Oren Harmon, welcome to the podcast.
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Orin Harman
Thank you so much for having me, Renee.
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Renee Garfinkel
Oren, what first drew you to metamorphosis, not just scientifically, but emotionally?
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Orin Harman
Well, it's actually a funny story. My wife emerged from a shower one evening with two stripes on a white plastic strip and announced that we were pregnant. She was pregnant. We were pregnant for the third time and we were joyous and extremely excited. And almost immediately I began having nightly dreams of a childhood dry aquarium that I once had in my room when I was a kid, and to which I would glue my face in the crack, the crack of night, trying to see a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis. And in the dreams, I would be sort of transported to this moment once again looking at the chrysalis, waiting to see any movement and seeing these beautiful blue butterflies emerge. And I started thinking after I dreamt this one night, and then a second night And a third and a fourth and a fifth. That there was might be some connection between the impending birth of our third child and the phenomenon of metamorphosis, which I'd always been drawn to. I'd been a butterfly collector when I was younger, and it always seemed like the closest thing to natural magic. And so I set out to investigate the connection between the two. And from the get go, it was both an intellectual journey and a very personal, intimate and emotional journey.
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Renee Garfinkel
So it came to you in a dream that almost seems prophetic.
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Orin Harman
That's what happened.
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Renee Garfinkel
Well, jellyfish is one of the weird species you examined. It can reverse its life cycle and begin again. Should we think of it as aging backwards?
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Orin Harman
It is a form of aging backwards. If you've ever seen that film Benjamin Button, it's the natural version of the film. I'll just explain the biology of it. So jellyfish have a life cycle whereby they start life out as an egg, just like every other creature. And then they develop into a planola, which sort of attaches itself to the seabed and looks a bit like a sprig. It looks like a plant, but there are these tiny discs that exist on the sprig. And with time they begin to detach themselves to bud away from the colony. And they look like upside down disks. But then they turn around and become the familiar Medusa that we all know from swimming in the ocean. Now with a particular species of Medusa called Turritopsis dornihi, otherwise known as the immortal jellyfish, when the going gets tough, meaning that there's some kind of toxin in the water or there isn't enough to eat. The adult Medusa, having gone through this life cycle from an egg, can decide to return to its childhood, in fact, to return to its origins, to its egg origins, and become a planula once again. And it can do it time after time after time. And so an individual immortal Medusa jellyfish can die in the mouth of a predator or in the net of a fisherman. But the. But the species, the genome of the species is in fact immortal. So this is an instance in nature where we think often of metamorphosis kind of in a linear fashion. You know, you're an egg, then you're a larva, then you're a pupa, then you're an adult, but you. The story of the immortal jellyfish reminds us of the cyclicality of all of this. And indeed, it is possible to grow backwards, to return to your origins.
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Renee Garfinkel
And in jellyfish, is it always a response to difficult environmental. Let's say, trauma that it experiences.
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Orin Harman
Yes. For all we know, that is the case. It's not because an individual jellyfish has had enough with adulthood and decides that it really misses its early childhood days. That's not something that we can say about their experience.
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Renee Garfinkel
It's not nostalgia.
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Orin Harman
Yes, it's not nostalgia, for all we know.
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Renee Garfinkel
Well, let's get a simple definition. In the simplest biological terms, what is metamorphosis?
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Orin Harman
So the definition of metamorphosis is dramatic post embryonic development. So metamorphosis is defined by what happens after birth. And there needs to be in the development and growth of the creature, some sort of extremely dramatic change for it to count as metamorphic. But you'll notice off the bat that there's something very fuzzy about this definition. It's actually quite arbitrary because you can ask how dramatic does dramatic post embryonic development have to be to count as metamorphic? And then you can also ask, you know, who gets to decide. So the definition itself, the fuzzy definition itself makes plain how much.
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Renee Garfinkel
Change is.
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Orin Harman
In the eye of the beholder. Which would help to explain why, when you look at the history of attempts to understand metamorphosis, going back to the ancient Greeks, we have used very different types of regimes of thought and of knowing, namely philosophy, theology and science, to make sense of this wondrous natural phenomenon.
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Renee Garfinkel
Well, you bring in another sea creature as a very interesting example, and that is the starfish, which can divide and become multiple selves. So when they do that, where in that case is the original self located?
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Orin Harman
Great question. So here's the natural history of the starfish again. Starts out life as an egg and then graduates into a larva which is bilateral. It has bilateral symmetry like you and me. And it looks like a kind of translucent angel with flapping wings. And it's pelagic. It swims in the midwaters. At a certain point in the life of this creature, which is minuscule, it's really tiny, on the order of just millimeters. A second developmental program kicks in within the coil within the stomach of this creature and begins to create the adult, which looks like a starfish. It's pigmented, it has radial symmetry in often five arms, and it grows to a point where it migrates to the ends of the larvae in the stomach of which it has been growing. And then in this sort of wonderful moment, natural moment, almost like an immaculate conception, there's sort of like a kiss, and they separate. The two creatures separate, the adult falling down to the seabed and becoming a sessile hunter there and the larva continuing its flapping life in the midwaters. Now, if I put these two creatures on my hand and showed them to you, you would have no way of guessing that they have anything to do with one another. And in fact, they continue to live simultaneously and have no interest in one another. But what is the relationship between the two? Is the larva the parent of the adult? No. Are they siblings? No. Are they cousins? No. They are an identity. And every cell in the body of these two incredibly differently looking creatures has the exact same genome. So we lack the language in our own human world to explain this relationship. It would almost be as if a juvenile gave birth to a parent and then continued to live simultaneously. Well, again, it's, it's. We. We don't have anything like it. But it would be as if a juvenile gave birth to its own adult self and then continued to live alongside its adult self. What would, what would that relationship even look like? So one of my favorite authors is John Steinbeck, and he has in that beautiful book from 1951, the log from the Sea of Cortez, there's a quote that goes like this. He says, the greatest danger for the speculative biologist is analogy. But parallels are amusing if they're not taken too seriously as regards the animal in question and are downright valuable as regards humans. So it's well known that anthropomorphizing is sort of a great no no in biology. But in fact, when we try to make sense and heads and tails of what we see in natural phenomenon in other creatures, we are trying to make sense of ourselves, which is one of the reasons I wrote this book, because there is so much incredible variation in development and in metamorphic development amongst creatures. Three quarters of all animal species undergo some form of metamorphosis. And while it is fascinating to try to figure out what is happening there biologically, how does it actually work? And also why does it exist? Because it's so expensive energetically. Why does a creature need to take itself apart? Why do there need to be so much cell death and genetic reprogram to become who they are? While all of that is fascinating, it's also really generative in trying to see ourselves in these creatures and therefore probing our own identities and understandings of selfhood.
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Renee Garfinkel
So would you say that humans, in a meaningful biological sense, are also metamorphic creatures?
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Orin Harman
Yes, I would say that there's something very arbitrary about our definition of metamorphosis. And we do not count as metamorphic creatures by definition. But, but in fact, when you look at the biological substrates involved, everything is on a continuum, as is every natural trait. And so, just to give one example, when we are fetuses in our mother's wombs, the hormone thyroxine courses across the placenta into our developing brains and determines to a great degree that the relative number of connective glial cells versus neurons in our prefrontal cortex. So the very organ that makes us imaginative, creative creatures is impacted upon quite determinatively by hormone called thyroxine. Now, I mention this because in sea squirts of all creatures, there is an organ called an endostil, which was born in evolution in an ancient sea hundreds of millions of years ago, and whose primary original function was to basically snatch up iodine from the waters because it was a very powerful antioxidant. But then the creature discovered that you could use it to create molecules that were useful in development, and they developed into an analogous system to the thyroxine system, something called the ecstene system. But in other creatures that led directly to us, like the lamprey, the thyroxine system was retained. So thyroxine plays a crucial role in the metamorphosis of a lamprey, which was born in the Devonian 360 million years ago, and it continues to play a crucial part in our development in our mother's womb. So, yes, there is something very arbitrary about whom we choose to call metamorphic and whom we decide are not metamorphic, like ourselves. Maybe that's why we invented Superman and Transformers. Maybe we feel we need these sort of dramatically morphing creatures. But in fact, when you look at our biology, we are metamorphosing creatures.
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Orin Harman
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Renee Garfinkel
Well, let's shift a little and talk to us about the various philosophical, artistic and scientific ideas around metamorphosis. How did they influence one another? And also, do you see those ideas echoed in today's futurism and biotechnology movements?
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Orin Harman
Ooh, yes. So it's really interesting, alongside the preoccupation, sort of what we would call the natural philosophy or scientific preoccupation with what metamorphosis is, there has been, going back to ancient times, a cultural preoccupation with the themes emanating from this natural phenomenon in art, in poetry, in theater, in painting, in music. And when you look at these stories from a bird's eye view, you do see that these two strains of preoccupation influence one another and are related to one another as they must be, as all sort of human endeavors. They don't respect the nice and tidy academic divides that have been devised in universities. So going back to Aristotle to talk a little bit about philosophy, he, like many in his time, thought that in the act of conception it was the male who brought the essence, the eidos to the table, and the female merely brought the matter. And because he didn't recognize they were looking at insects, he didn't see, he couldn't observe sex amongst insects. Then these creatures needed to go through some second transformation in order to become who they were, because they didn't have a father who gave them an essence. And for him that was a spontaneous generation. Now this fit into a philosophy that really a philosophy of perfection and imperfection in a causal universe whose apotheosis is humanity the most perfect of all creatures. And that impacted upon how he described and saw metamorphosis. When you jump forward to early modern thinkers, they looked at nature and they observed metamorphosis. And to them it immediately elicited the thought of the transfiguration of Jesus to Christ. So this was a kind of earthly reminder that deliverance was possible for humans in a godly universe. And then going into the modern period, we sort of throw away teleology and we try to stick to mechanistic explanations. But different strains within, within scientific thinking, constantly rebel against, against that and try to adopt the kind of holistic, more romantic understanding of what life really is. All of these ideas, these three regimes, philosophy, theology, science, are reflected in the culture, in various modes of artistic expression. So Ovid, who gave us 90% of the Greek Mythology that we know from the ancient world is obsessed with. With radical transformations, giving us the stories of Apollo running after Daphne, who the only thing that she can do to protect herself from his unwanted amorous advances is to turn into a laurel tree. And of course, Hera, in her vengeance, turns IO into a heifer and then has her run across the seas to which she gives her name, the Ionic Sea. And all the way into the 20th century in plays like G.M. barrie's Peter Pan, which is about a boy who never grows up. And it turns out that without knowing it, GM Barry was describing a Mexican axolotl, which, which, which foregoes its final metamorphosis and remains a lifelong juvenile while being sexual. And that for that reason also has incredible superpowers, regenerative powers. It can regenerate a limb, but also a heart and a brain. So, so there's, There's a strong connection between our artistic attempts to deal with these themes and our scientific attempts to understand the phenomenon. What was the second part of the question?
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Renee Garfinkel
Do I see whether you see those ideas in some form in today's futurism and biotechnology movements?
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Orin Harman
AI Well, I mean, one aspect that I see that that sort of connects in my mind is that we increasingly entertain the possibility of, of avatars, of being able to live in alternative possible worlds apart from our physical existence. And this in some ways could, could bring about a. A. A human revolution that is, that would inches closer to, say, the experience that I mentioned earlier of the starfish existing. Existing both as an adult and, and, And a youth and in different morphs of ourselves. I mean, we, we have a very ambivalent connection to change. We're very ambivalent about change. It's, It's a fact of life. But we look into the mirror and we wince. We can't quite understand whether that we're the same person that we were yesterday. We bemoan growing older and at the same time sort of celebrate how wrinkles are also a manifestation of growing wisdom. So change is a fact of life that we struggle with constantly. It represents new beginnings, but also endings and continuations. And I think that by looking at myriad instances of change in nature, we can inform ourselves and maybe sort of open our minds to possibilities for us humans, for whom change in radical change is often manifested more internally than it is in our bodies, although they change too.
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Renee Garfinkel
We change and we stay the same. So what then would you say is the thread of self? Is it memory, relationships, or something else?
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Orin Harman
Yeah, that's a super, super interesting riddle. We know from flies. Excuse me, returning to the prosaic, but people who have studied how the brain of a maggot turns into the brain of a fly within a 48 hour period have shown us that what's happening there is sort of a rewiring of the brain, a restructuring of the connections between the axons. And in fact, when it comes to the fly, it's quite fascinating. During a 24 hour, 24 hour window, the fly, 7 out of its 10 sort of computational compartments along, along the axons in its, in its brain completely detach themselves from any inputs or outputs. So every fly, in its development, every maggot, in turning into a fly, accomplishes what every Buddhist monk tries a lifetime to do, which is to sort of exist in this nirvanic state of no inputs, no self. But what's fascinating is that in the case of flies, they therefore, because of all this restructuring, there are no memories that are carried over from the maggot to the fly. On the other hand, in butterflies it's been shown that when you expose the caterpillar to a certain toxin and then shock it, when it becomes a butterfly, it will stay far afield from this same toxin. So there is some footprint, a memory footprint, which connects the caterpillar to the butterfly, even though in the pupa that brain has been rearranged altogether. So in comparing the fly and the butterfly, in order to understand this difference, you need to see, okay, what is happening differently at the level of neuronal architecture. And there is a theory, Jim Truman is a proponent of this idea, that it's really a numbers game. It's, it's just the amount, the number of neurons who had early ancestry in the brain which retain over the metamorphosis compared to those that are completely novel. So when we ask ourselves, what is selfhood made of, we often feel that memory is a big part of it. And when we lose our memories, we sort of, we lose our past. We don't know who we are. So this is a very important anchor for us. So memory is a part of it, but it may not be everything. It may not be everything. There may be other things involved in selfhood. It's interesting to note that there are people who are episodic in terms of their biography, described as episodic. And there are people who are narrative. And this is quite a, a strict divide. People really divide into one or the other. And narrative people are people who tell stories to themselves and to others about their lives, about their biographies. They say, I was born in Jerusalem and then I went to this high school and attended this university. That's where I met my wife. And then we had three kids. And there's a story involved. Those are narrative people. Episodic people really don't put much valence on the past, on their own past. They sort of live in the moment. Interestingly, though, the philosopher who speaks about this difference between people is. His name is Galen Strawson. He's an Oxford philosopher who became famous for arguing that free will is a fiction. So a perceptive biographer would notice that this Galen Strawson who says of himself that he doesn't really care too much about his past and doesn't understand his identity by way of storytelling, biographical storytelling. This same Galen Strawson had a father whose name was also Strawson, who was also an Oxford don and a philosopher who argued for the reality of free will. So a perceptive biographer would see that even though internally life can be felt as discontinuous, externally, it can actually make sense as a continuous story on an arc. We are storytelling creatures even when the story that we tell ourselves is that we don't have a story. Yeah. And life can be inconsistent in very consistent ways if that inconsistency provides us some anchoring, some meaning for our identity.
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Renee Garfinkel
Well, let's look at the concept at a social level. Can societies undergo metamorphosis? And if they can, what would trigger transformation?
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Orin Harman
That is such a good question. I think that societies do undergo metamorphosis. It's almost impossible to deny that. Especially today in the world in which we live in. I think many people feel that a world that we once knew and sort of understood is slipping between our fingers. I'm reminded of that beautiful book by Stefan Zweig, the World of Yesterday, where he describes a world in turn of the century Vienna that was so stable and so beloved and which just flew away and morphed into something that was very different and difficult. So I think that for sure, societies change. I think that what changes society is very seldom argument. In other words, when we try to change people's minds by argument, we do not succeed. All the research shows that that doesn't happen, but rather lived, experienced, live. Experience is something that we live through that is close to us, that we feel almost viscerally. These are the kinds of experiences that change humans and then by extension, society. So there's a. There's a. The story of. What was his name? Something v Texas. A man who was caught in flagrante delicto in Texas in his own home, by the police having homosexual sex and he was thrown into jail because it was against the law. And this was a determination of the Supreme Court of the United States. Some years later, with the exact same court, the case was brought again before the justices and they reversed their decision. And someone wrote a book about this and trying to figure out where did the change come from? And the answer was that this justice said, oh, I discovered that my granddaughter is gay. And the other one said, my best friend told me that he's gay. And that changed my view. So I think that lived experience is a much stronger catalyst for change. On the other hand, we have institutions in society that are meant to be anchors. And they're meant to be anchors because within our natures as human beings, we have both rational elements and irrational elements. And the institutions in the way that they are built and set up can be the maintainers of a rationality that is difficult to expect from humans. So there are always forces of both status and change in a society, and I guess that will always be the case.
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Renee Garfinkel
Finally, Oren, I like to think that wisdom is a factor in an individual human's metamorphosis over the course of their own lifetime. So let me ask you this. What has becoming a father again taught you about change?
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Orin Harman
Well, I, you know, becoming a father has been the most wonderful experience of my life, bar none. There's nothing more meaningful and important to me than my children and my relationship to them. And as in the words of the song, it sort of allows for a second childhood. You sort of retrace your own childhood and return to your childhood by living alongside your kids. It's also a great gift. I think perhaps the. The most dramatic change about becoming a parent. It's kind of a Copernican revolution. It sort of moves yourself away from the center of your being. And there could be no greater gift than not being in the center of your universe. Kids are that gift. And so it's something very precious. It's something that grounds one and allows for a perspective, which I believe is healthier and allows for more empathy and altruism for giving, for giving to others. So that's what parenthood has taught me.
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Renee Garfinkel
The book is a natural and human history. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me today, Oren.
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Orin Harman
Thank you so much, Rene. It's been a pleasure.
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Renee Garfinkel
And thanks to our researcher, Bela Pasakov.
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Orin Harman
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Orin Harman
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- [36:52]
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