Three quarters of animal species undergo metamorphosis. Why are we so sure humans don't? Historian of science Oren Harman takes us from butterflies to starfish in search of an answer, and toward a surprising way of thinking about what happens when a baby turns someone into a parent.


Shownotes:

  • Much of the conversation draws on Oren Harman's exploration of metamorphosis across the natural world in his book Metamorphosis: A Natural and Human History.
  • Long before founding psychoanalysis, a young Sigmund Freud spent weeks dissecting hundreds of eels in an unsuccessful search for their reproductive organs at the Zoological Station in Trieste. 
  • Oren reflects on Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous proposition: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
  • This podcast is part of the Early Childhood Matters platform by the Van Leer Foundation.


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