Oren Harman Explores the History of Metamorphosis

In Metamorphosis: A Natural and Human History, writer and historian of science Oren Harman presents an insightful exploration on the topic of transformation in nature and how these processes connect to the human experience. From butterflies to starfish to axolotl’s, his book provides countless instances of metamorphosis that occurs in the natural world around us. According to Harman, approximately three-quarters of Earth’s species undergo metamorphosis, a number he finds both astonishing and remarkable. Aside from this surprising statistic, what inspired Harmon to examine this topic further? “Well, I feel as if the subject chose me in a way… One evening, my wife disappeared into the shower and when she emerged… announced that we were pregnant for the third time… but that very night I had a dream… where I used to rear caterpillars and as a kid, kind of, wake up in the middle of the night with a flashlight on my head trying to spot a beautiful blue butterfly emerge from a chrysalis… but funnily enough this dream recurred again and again… so I started thinking that there might be some connection between metamorphosis and the life cycle and the impending birth of our third child… pregnancy, kind of metaphorically, feels like our version of the chrysalis and there was some connection there that I felt that needed to be explored…”

While Harman’s book centers on the changes many of Earth’s creatures experience, he believes their transformations also help humans make sense of their own development. He remarked, “…we do science… to find what we call truth, but we also do science to encounter metaphors in nature and in the universe that help us explain ourselves to ourselves and one of the… underlying themes of this book is that by looking at all of the wonderful examples of change in nature we can learn something about ourselves… We’re all connected on a tree of life, and while we have hoped to separate ourselves from the rest it’s actually a good idea to remember that we’re all on the same tree.”