A Human Metamorphosis with Oren Harman

Michael Feigelson Okay, so imagine you’re speaking to a five-year-old or a six-year old and you wanna explain to them how them showing up transformed their parents. Is there an analogy from nature that you would use to help them understand?

Oren Harman Okay, so that’s easy. It’s the immortal jellyfish. The immortal jellyfish is an incredible creature because when it becomes an adult, it can choose to shrivel up again and change back into a baby and then grow into a kid and grow into adult again. And it can do that again and again and again and again. That’s why it’s called the immortal jellyfish. It never dies.

Michael Feigelson The immortal jellyfish, a creature that survives by becoming young again. Not exactly the metaphor I was expecting for parenthood, but let’s hear him out.

Oren Harman And I would say to my six-year-old that when they were born, they gave me the gift of the immortal jellyfish because through them, I was able to become a baby again and a kid again. And then I became an adult, but then I had another baby so I could become a baby again and a kid again. And then, I did it another time. That’s what I’d tell a kid. I’d tell him “you gave me the life of an immortal jellyfish”.

Michael Feigelson Maybe that’s the real gift of parenthood. Not eternal life, but the chance to move through childhood more than once. Your child pulls you back into worlds you thought you’d left behind. Worlds full of wonder, play, absurd questions at 6 a.m., except this time, you return as both the child and the person making breakfast.

For decades, we’ve told a powerful story about early childhood. Babies’ brains are flexible and alive with possibility. They’re like tiny scientists running hundreds of experiments every day to figure out how the world works. But we’ve spent far less time thinking about what happens to their parents. How might science explain that eerie, very beautiful feeling that when a baby arrives, you are suddenly no longer the same person?

My name is Michael Fagelson. I’m a dad and I’m also the CEO of the Van Leer Foundation, an organization that has worked with parents and young children for nearly 80 years. When my daughter Mila was born, I knew the science of early childhood backwards and forwards. I literally ran an organization dedicated to it. And still, I was completely unprepared for what was happening inside my own mind and body. That gap between what parents experience and what we can explain is the space in which this podcast lives.

We begin with a simple idea that when a baby is born, a parent is also born. And in that transition, just like their babies, parents’ brains and bodies team up to help them learn and adapt at high velocity, developing a set of skills and perspectives valuable for their kids and for society as a whole. This is Birth of a Parent.

And today, we begin with Metamorphosis. Our guest is Oren Harmon. A historian of science, writer, father, and someone who believes that to understand parenthood, we should look to nature.

Michael Feigelson I wanted to start by asking you to take me back to the moment that you were born as a father.

Oren Harman Wow So that was almost 12 years ago. Well, just in terms of the drama itself, Shaizi just didn’t want to come out. And for 40 hours, for 40 hours, she stuck to her guns and refused to come out. And Yael, who had made a decision earlier not to take any pitocin, and none of that by, you know, hour 39 was screaming, was shouting, was yelling, Pitocin! Pitocine! Give me pitocin. Which is what happened and she came out and she literally leapt out. She leapt out onto Yael’s chest. That’s what I remember. I mean, as much as one can remember from these most dramatic moments in life. And my first contact with her was that I, first I looked at her toes and I saw that her second toe was longer than her big toe. And so I immediately recognized that she was mine and I made that comment to my wife. Who half-smiled through all the sweat and tears. And then I handed my pinky to my baby, and she just, she caught it so strongly, as if her life depended on it. And I remember that moment thinking that this was a revolution in my life, that my life had changed forever.

Michael Feigelson A newborn grabs your finger for balance and somehow you’re the one who feels the ground shift beneath you.

Oren Harman You know I’m scholar, I read a lot of books, I have thoughts about things, and we all learned that the greatest revolution was the Copernican Revolution, when Copernicus, a Polish astronomer, discovered that in fact the Earth is not the center of the solar system, but rather the Sun. And you know, the more time I spent as a parent, the more that became clear to me that this was absolutely momentous. I had been thrown out of the center of my own universe. Thank goodness.

Michael Feigelson Of course, parenthood is often described as life-changing, but Oren means something more literal. Not that children change your lifestyle or your priorities, but that they reorganize you from the inside out. They induce metamorphosis. And for Oren, the fascination with why and how this happens started long before he became a father. It started when he was just a little boy.

Oren Harman When I was young, I was a budding lepidopterist, meaning that I loved butterflies and I collected butterflies. My grandmother and grandfather lived across the street and they had this kind of flowing garden. And I would spend most of my time if I wasn’t playing football, dashing after butterflies and trying to catch them with a plastic bag. And I had a dry aquarium and I’d spend nights just staying up as late as I could with a little flashlight attached to my forehead. And a black notepad waiting for the chrysalis to stir and for that miracle to happen, for the butterfly, the adult butterfly to emerge, thinking that I was kind of solving the great mysteries of the universe.

Michael Feigelson Actually, this isn’t really so unique. In many cultures, and in many children’s stories, across the Americas, Africa, Europe, China, India, the butterfly is used as a symbol of transformation. What’s different about Orin’s story is that years later, that childhood fascination would come fluttering back into his life in an unexpected way.

Oren Harman My wife, Yaeli, announced one evening emerging from the shower that she was pregnant with our third child. And we were, of course, ecstatic. And that night, I had a dream about my childhood aquarium. And I became a kid again. And I was, you know, gazing in the middle of the night into this aquarium and seeing a blue butterfly emerge from the chrysalis. And I woke up in the morning, I was like, that’s kind of interesting, but what was amazing was that that dream recurred again and again and again for weeks. And at that point I was, okay, someone is trying to tell me something. And of course, metaphorically speaking, a pregnancy in a way is our kind of human version of a chrysalis or a pupa, even though they’re biologically different. So I started thinking about, there’s some kind of connection between the impending birth of our third kid and my childhood memories of metamorphosis and I wanna dive deeper into this connection. So that was the origin of Metamorphosis, the book.

Michael Feigelson So Oren wasn’t just using metamorphosis as a poetic way to talk about change. He began to think about whether transformation itself might be one of the fundamental patterns of life. This led him to explore a strange wonderland of animal transformations and the humans that studied them over the past few centuries. Creatures that dissolve, regenerate, split apart, and rebuild themselves. Stories that, as you’ll hear, start to feel a little less distant from our own lives than you might expect. But before we get to the creatures, let’s start with a definition. What counts as metamorphosis?

Oren Harman The biological definition of metamorphosis is dramatic post embryonic development.

Michael Feigelson So how dramatic does it have to be?

Oren Harman Good question. There are different kinds of metamorphosis. So in many insects, butterflies, flies, there’s something called “complete metamorphoses” where you actually have three full stages. In the case of the butterfly, you have the caterpillar, then you have a pupa, and then the creature that emerges from that is an adult. So that’s complete metamorphosis and it’s the most dramatic of all because if you look at a butterfly and you look at a caterpillar you have no idea that they belong to the same species and you would never guess that this is in fact the same creature. In other words, every cell in the body of these two different morphs has the exact same genome. So, that’s the most dramatic that you can imagine. And what’s interesting is, I mean, metamorphosis, incredibly, is a phenomenon in which three-quarters of all animal species partake. And that is very surprising because most people, when they think of metamorphoses, they sort of have these quaint idiosyncratic thoughts that are often related to childhood about caterpillars and butterflies and tadpoles and frogs. But three quarters of all animal species undergo metamorphosis. So, interestingly, what I just told you about insects is apart from what you see in metamorphoses in the oceans. Because in insects, you spend most of your time growing and then kind of a fleeting fraction of your life, finding a mate and reproducing. Whereas in the ocean, in marine invertebrates, it’s the other way around. The larvae have short lives. And then you turn dramatically into an adult, often looking nothing at all like you looked when you were young, and spend most of your life as an adult.

Michael Feigelson The more Oren talked, the more I thought, why? If metamorphosis is so costly, so risky, so energetically absurd, why is it so common in nature?

Michael Feigelson  From an evolutionary standpoint, why do animals go through this? Like, what’s the purpose? Why not just come out ready?

Oren Harman So, that’s a really good question. The reason why creatures undergo metamorphosis and are born physically different from what they turn into is probably the question about metamorphoses about which we know the least. Why must creatures go through so much destruction and rewiring and remodeling and cell death and so forth, to become who they are? That is a deep question, you know, three quarters of all animal species undergo metamorphosis, but it’s extremely costly energetically and in time and it puts the creature under stress and duress and you know when you’re sitting there in a chrysalis you’re not moving so something can eat you. All of that, so why does that happen? And then, just biologically again, it’s really wild. I mean, let me just provide an example with a sea squirt if I may, just to illustrate the biology. So the sea squirt starts life out as an egg, and then it hatches into something that looks like a tadpole, meaning that it has a head, it has two eye spots that look like eyes, and it has an undulating tail. And it swims, it swims in the midwaters. Tiny little creature. And then at a certain point in its life, it heads downwards based on cues that are coming from the environment. And a cue arrives and this little tadpole swims, swims down, down, down, until it latches with its mouth on a rock or a coral. And at this point, an extremely dramatic thing happens, and that is that it basically eats itself up. It consumes its tail. And when they latch onto the rock or to the coral, they completely destroy their neural cord. They take it apart. And they turn into one of the simplest creatures on the planet. It’s so simple that it has no natural predators, which is basically a sack. And Darwin himself wondered about this creature. He was like, wait a second, why is this creature going back to, in evolutionary terms, to simpler beginnings rather than ascending in the tree of life? And of course, there’s a wonderful lesson included in this, and that is that life doesn’t necessarily go forward. It sometimes goes backward. Whatever is good for the creature, whatever is more adaptive. So to answer your question, we have different theories. One theory is that metamorphosis evolved because it reduces intergenerational conflict. So if you’re a caterpillar, you eat a specific food, specific plant, that’s your diet. And then you graduate into a flying creature, a butterfly or a moth, and you can fly anywhere. And so you will not compete with your young self for the same food. So that’s one sort of general answer to the question why metamorphosis evolved. There have been works in the last 10 years in the lab that I was at, and what was shown there is that there’s a trade-off in evolution between growth and differentiation. There’s a point where it’s better to stop growing and begin differentiating. And that point is very much related to the species and its ecology, so it’s, again, very unique. But there does exist a kind of optimal moment where it’s to stop eating and to start turning into who you’re gonna be.

Michael Feigelson The strange thing about the sea squirt is that from a human perspective, its transformation doesn’t make sense. It gives up complexity, destroys part of itself, it even stops moving. But nature doesn’t care about human ideas of progress. And listening to Oren, I wondered whether parenthood asks something similar of us.

Michael Feigelson I want to ask if you would consider your transition to fatherhood a metamorphosis, you know, in the way that we’ve been describing it.

Oren Harman Undoubtedly. And although we do not consider ourselves to be metamorphic creatures, all of us in fact live on a continuum. And metamorphosis, like many other traits, is a kind of continuous trait. And what’s really interesting is that when you look at the underlying biology of different points in our cycle. You actually see that it’s the same self genes and receptors and molecules, often hormones, that are playing a role in our development as they do in the development of a cockroach. So just to be more specific, thyroxine. Thyroxin is a hormone that courses in between the cells of the developing brain of the embryo. So, the very organ that in our culture we feel defines us, you know, provides our wonderful imaginations, our ability to imagine anything and also to understand our mortality, that very organ is quite dramatically determined – its shape and its structure – by the amounts of thyroxine coursing in between the cells of the developing brain in embryo. Now, that same thyroxine plays a crucial role in the flicking on of metamorphosis in insects. So the same molecule that signals to a flea that it needs to metamorphose is the one that plays a determinative role in structuring our brain. So was this a metamorphosis? It was a great metamorphosis. Are we metamorphic creatures? Yes, we are metamorphotic creatures.

Michael Feigelson Hello? Hello?
Mom Hi Mike, how are you?
Michael Feigelson Good, how are you? Where are you?
Mom I’m at my trainer, working out.
Mom What are you doing today?
Mom Well, among other things, I did 35 second planks.
Mom That’s a lot.
Mom I can do more, I can to 45.
Michael Feigelson Pretty impressive.
Mom For an older woman. Yeah.
Michael Feigelson So, I’m doing this podcast, remember?
Mom Yeah.
Michael Feigelson I was talking to this scientist who says that becoming a parent is a metamorphosis. What do you think?
Mom I think that’s true, absolutely.
Michael Feigelson And what did you turn into?
Mom A swan.
Michael Feigelson A Swan?
Mom Yeah.
Michael Feigelson Why a swan?
Mom Well, because, for one thing, swans are very committed mothers, you know, I watched them on the pond here, and um…
Michael Feigelson Anything else?
Mom Well, pregnancy felt like sitting on my eggs for nine months. Are you recording this?
Michael Feigelson Uh, yeah?
Mom Did I say anything stupid yet?
Michael Feigelson Not yet!

Michael Feigelson Oren says we’re metamorphic creatures, and my mom says she’s a swan. Either way, parenthood seems to involve becoming something else, and Oren means that more literally than you might think.

Because Oren is saying that beneath all our culture and language and self-importance, we may still be running on some of the same ancient biological machinery as a cockroach? But I’m guessing, hoping, that cockroaches are not Oren’s go-to analogy for the transition to parenthood. Fascinating as it is, it’s not the motivational story I’m looking for.

So I ask him, from his perspective, which creature best captures what becoming a parent actually feels like? Fair warning, Oren’s answer will take us on a bit of a detour, but by the end of this underwater journey, it’ll make perfect sense.

Oren Harman The eel is a super interesting story, and I’m speaking particularly about the European eel, which is called Aquila Aquila. And for centuries, the origin of the European eel baffled the greatest minds. No one had ever seen an eel have sex. No one even managed to locate its genitalia. Until, Sigmund Freud, in 1877, arrived at the zoological station in Trieste. He was 20 years old, and he was determined to find eel testicles if his scientific career depended on it. And every day for about four weeks, he opened the tummies of eels from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon. He wrote to a friend in a kind of apologetic moment that, you know, he was very sorry to have to do that, but unfortunately, eels do not leave diaries. And… He failed. He failed his first scientific paper. So it was left to this kind of crazy Dane, a man by the name of Schmidt. And this was in 1921, so about 100 years ago. He found the breeding grounds of the eel somewhere in the beautifully, stunningly clear waters between Puerto Rico and Bermuda in what we call the Sargasso Sea. They are born in breeding grounds in the Sargasso Sea, and they are tiny flecks of life. They’re slivers of life, and then they brave the terrible waves of the North Atlantic for about two to three years, kind of floating in the currents in a journey of about 6,000 kilometers until they reach the mouths of the European rivers. And what it begins to do is to swim up against the current of these European rivers. And it’s so determined that it actually scales verticals, it goes through thrushes, and it’s on its way to find a den. And when it does find its den upriver, it settles down, it’s extremely territorial, and it grows and grows and grows into a fierce muscular hunter with kind of brownish yellowish colors and it can live there for about 50 years. And then at a certain point in its life, it turns around, it leaves its lair, it leaves its den, and it starts going downriver back to the Atlantic. And when it reaches the mouth of the Atlantic, it goes through its final metamorphosis, which is extremely dramatic, because in this metamorphosis, it needs to prepare its body, now as a full-grown eel, to return 6,000 kilometers back to the breeding grounds at the Sargasso Sea. And when autumn comes, the eel slips back into the Atlantic. Its fins have grown longer and stronger in order to propel it. Its eyes have grown larger and blue in order, to allow vision in the depths. All of its chemistry has changed to accommodate salt water, and its digestive system shuts down. So it’s now dependent on the energy stored in its fat reserves. This eel will travel 6,000 kilometers and will not eat once. But it has roe now inside of it and it’s completely single-minded and this eel has a cycle to complete before it expires and its destination is the Sargasso Sea and it’s going to get there. So, when I think of a metaphor for parenthood, I actually tip my hat to the European eel, to Aquila Aquila, because this is a creature that lives a long life, goes through many dramatic changes, and its single characteristic is its determination. Of course, so many things go with that determination, I mean its ability, its skill. Just think of the feet of navigation. Returning from a Swedish river or whatever, all the way back to Bermuda. Exactly to the place where it was born. I mean, that’s wild.

Michael Feigelson Determination and sacrifice and skill. And I like very much the idea that so much of the skill comes online later in its life, right in the moment when it becomes responsible for the next generation. This resonates because all the studying and working and learning I did as a boy and then as a young man, it paled in comparison to the training I got from the experience of becoming a parent.

You enter it thinking you’re raising a child. And then somewhere along the way, exhausted and carrying 17 tiny snacks, three rocks, and a single sock for reasons you no longer understand, you realize your children may also be training you.

Training you in areas we practice less and less in modern day life, but that we need perhaps more than ever.

Michael Feigelson One of the ideas that we’re exploring in the series is the idea that the transition to parenthood It’s just like training. And that when we’re in the chrysalis of those early years, we’re developing new skills that are valuable, not just for our kids, but for all parts of our life. We’ve talked about sacrifice, we’ve talked about determination, regeneration. I’m curious, for new parents, from your point of view, what are the key skills, perspectives, abilities that are important in the world today that we get trained in by our kids and by that experience?

Oren Harman You know, the word human comes from “humus”, which means “of the earth”, “stemming from the earth” and humans have attempted through religion as well as through the secular enlightenment to kind of extract ourselves from nature. But the truth is that we are most human, we’re most ourselves, I think, when we recognize how much we are a part of nature. How much we are animals with instincts. And becoming parents is one of the greatest opportunities for this realization, for this recognition. It’s beside ourselves. We, you know, it’s kind of stamped on us. It’s a recognition that we have little control over. As we said, you know, we’re surprised by these superpowers. And what a wonderful surprise it is to recognize, you know, to discover that you do have this capacity for forgiveness. You want to kill this kid, but you love it more than anything in the world. And you know, the kid is crying in the middle of the night and the baby is crying and it won’t stop crying or even worse, you’re on a plane and everyone’s angry at you and your baby is throwing up and it’s just hell. But… You have all the patience in the world for this baby and all the forgiveness in the world for his baby. And foresight too, foresight is an interesting thing. We begin to exercise foresight in a way that we haven’t used, that we haven’t exercised earlier before we become parents because we have to be two steps ahead of a creature whose cognition doesn’t yet allow for that type of foresight. So we now exercise foresight more strongly. And again, I think that in an interesting way, despite our secular and religious traditions, recognizing our animality, which is something that manifests so strongly in parenthood, is probably the greatest gift that we can give ourselves. And probably parenthood is the best way to do that. Parenthood is a true opportunity to see that we are one with the cockroaches and the immortal jellyfish and the soaring bird and the ape.

Michael Feigelson Parenthood doesn’t just make us more responsible adults, it also makes us more animalistic. Suddenly your life revolves around bodily fluids, sleep deprivation, vigilance, attachment, tiny, unpredictable creatures making strange noises in the dark.

And yet, strangely, it’s from inside this deeply biological state that some of the biggest philosophical questions come roaring back into view. Sometimes while packing lunch boxes, sometimes while cleaning vomit off seat 14B, and sometimes while teaching your child to ride a bike.

Oren Harman So, Wittgenstein is my hero in this sense in the Tractatus towards the end, he says that “about which you cannot speak, you must remain silent”. And it seems that humans are very bad at that. About which we cannot speak, we speak without ceasing. We talk and we talk and we babble. And then, you know, you have a moment with the kid, like I did with my son when I was teaching him how to ride a bike. When one day on the bike he says to me, “Abba, why is there something?” And I said, “what do you mean?” And he said, “why is there not nothing? Why is there something?” And that may be the deepest question of all, you know, of all philosophy. Humans speak about that all the time, I mean philosophers speak about it. Has any of this talk advanced us even one millimeter towards being able to answer the question for a young mind who’s grasping to understand the universe and understand themselves and their role and what is the meaning of meaning, what is this all about? I’m not at all certain. Because when you begin to answer a question like that for a kid, you know, they’re not foolish, they’re extremely wise. Somehow you know you’re doing kind of time in reverse and you reach the Big Bang and then they’ll ask you, yeah, but what happened before the Big Bang? And none of us have an answer, an adequate answer to that. But it’s so wonderful to see a young mind that has yet to be clouded by all of the jargon and the language that we’ve developed to try to think about these things. Some of it has inched us in some instances, but it seems like the great questions, the great question when you’re sort of like, they are the question of the child kind of just looking out at the universe and asking “why?” And all of us, humanity, we are that child despite our best attempts to act like adults. And so it’s wonderful to be reminded of that by a naive kid with a lot of wisdom in between his ears.

Michael Feigelson There was something beautiful in hearing a historian of science admit that in the end, he didn’t really have an answer for his son. And maybe that’s part of the parental metamorphosis too. Learning to stay present inside questions that cannot be solved before bedtime. Or perhaps there is a story that can solve both at once. So I ask Oren, before we sign off, does he have a final creature who might help us contend with the mysteries of the universe and get the kids to sleep?

Oren Harman  The Starfish. The starfish is a great metamorphosis story because the starfish starts life out as an egg which hatches and becomes this beautiful creature that seems like it has flapping wings and swims about translucent, no color just flapping in the waters. And then at a certain point in the life of this creature, a second developmental program kicks in in its tummy and begins to create the adult, which is colored and that creature grows in the tummy of the larva until it reaches a certain size and then it migrates to the tips of the larva and in this wonderful moment, almost like an immaculate conception, there’s kind of a kiss of separation and the larva continues its life and the starfish falls down to the seabed becoming a benthic creature there. Now, these two creatures continue to co-exist. And if you put them on your hand and you show them to a kid, there is no way that a kid would be able to figure out that these two creatures are the same creature. Every cell in the bodies of these two very different looking creatures has the same DNA, the same genome. And so when you try to figure out the relationship between the two in human terms, well, is the larva the parent of the starfish? No. Are they siblings? No. Are they cousins? No! They are an identity. They are the same creature. They’re just different forms of the same creature and they live simultaneously. In human terms it would be as if a child gave birth to its adult self and then lived simultaneously beside its adult self. But it’s really something amazing to try to wrap your head around, for a kid or for anyone. Imagine you could give birth to your own adult self and then continue to live alongside that adult self, what would the world look like for you? That’s something to fall asleep on.

Michael Feigelson The strange thing is that by this point in our conversation, the starfish story doesn’t actually feel that alien to me because if this podcast begins with the idea that when a baby is born, a parent is also born, then maybe children do give birth to adults, not finished adults, but the beginning of a new version.

Which is maybe why the beginning of parenthood can feel so disorienting. Your child arrives. And suddenly there’s another version of you walking around too. And the old one is also still there.

And this new version of yourself, it’s a little confusing. One minute a jellyfish, next a butterfly, a tiny finger holder, an eel traveling 6,000 kilometers without eating, a philosopher, a cycling coach, storyteller, and a starfish.

It can get crowded and confusing to remember who’s who. But that’s all part of the metamorphosis, what it feels like inside the chrysalis.

Oren gave us the big metaphor, parenthood as metamorphosis. But next week on Birth of a Parent, we leave the jellyfish and the sea squirts behind and go inside the human brain.

Susana Carmona Now we can say with the data we have right now that your brain changed more during pregnancy than it did so during adolescence.

Michael Feigelson If you’d like to support this series, the best way is simply to follow Birth of a Parent on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. It really helps more people discover the show. Thanks for listening.