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The idea that living creatures bear copies of themselves – that humans birth babies, frogs lay frogspawn, chickens lay eggs, and so on – might seem obvious. But, as we learn in the opening chapters of Metamorphosis: A Natural and Human History, the idea that like breeds like is relatively new.
Historically, reproduction was a more chaotic affair. The ancients believed in ‘spontaneous generation’. Ovid’s Metamorphoses may be the most famous example of the genre, but the Roman poet was not alone in conceiving of change as abrupt and complete. The architect Vitruvius wrote that certain winds could generate bookworms; Virgil believed that bees were born from the carcass of a slain bullock; Pliny the Elder claimed that silkworms sprang from the vapour on oak blossoms.
The understanding of metamorphosis, back then, was strange, poetic, funny… and demonstrably false. But are the real-world examples of metamorphosis any less weird, or any more believable? There is an instinctive wonder in the genesis of a butterfly that even a child can grasp, as sales figures of The Very Hungry Caterpillar will attest (50 million and counting). There is something magical – something miraculous – in the idea that one creature can radically transform into another.
Writer and historian Oren Harman is the latest figure to be publicly captivated by the notion. Eric Carle’s famous story of that little egg on a leaf was an early catalyst for Harman’s own childhood interest in metamorphosis. Some fifty years later, Metamorphosis: A Natural and Human History is the result.
In this, his latest book, Harman delves into the mysteries of transformation with a tireless curiosity and an academic attention to detail. He takes the notion of spontaneous generation as his starting point, following the path from ancient misunderstandings to modern observation, ending with philosophical musings upon the nature of the self. The book travels just as widely through space as through time, taking us from the tropical forests of Suriname to the mountains of New Hampshire.
It is, as the title suggests, as much a human history as a natural one. Harman is as interested in the cultural, artistic and religious underpinnings of metamorphosis as he is in the biological context. This is as much the story of the people who have advanced our understanding of metamorphosis as it is about the science of metamorphosis itself.
The book is structured around four central characters, including Maria Sibylla Merian, a 17th-century German naturalist, whose illustrations of metamorphosis in action remain as beautiful today as they were groundbreaking back then: it was a pleasure to be introduced to the work of this little-known scientist and artist.
But Harman is a writer who revels in following a thread to its end – he has approached his source material, he writes, as “a fellow curious heart”. Thus he unspools, too, the histories of characters who are only tangentially connected to the theme. Catherine the Great, for instance, earns a chapter on the grounds that Harman’s youthful obsession with the large blue butterfly was eventually replaced by one with the Russian empress, and he draws a somewhat tenuous connection between the two. We learn not just about the controversial naturalist Ernst Haeckel, but also about Goethe, Strauss and Nabokov.
Sometimes metamorphosis itself becomes lost in the noise. The topic is already wide, biologically speaking. It has been estimated that around 80% of all animal species – most of them insects or amphibians – do it in one way or another. Even then, the definition can be flimsy: everything changes, so where do we draw the line? Pulling in the threads of culture, religion and philosophy, Harman enriches the topic and makes it wider still. Venturing beyond these avenues, however, the narrative occasionally flounders, and it can be a relief when the story returns to its cast of main characters.
These individuals bring a welcome humanity to a complex topic. Harman is at his best when describing the lives, loves and fieldwork of his protagonists. The story of Merian, taking refuge from her husband within the castle walls of the religious Labadist community, all while pondering scientific questions whose answers seemed at odds with a beneficent God, add drama to the science. One can imagine the inner struggles Merian must have faced – though, as Harman gives voice to Merian’s thoughts himself, one needn’t bother. On one occasion, he has his pregnant, caterpillar-obsessed scientist wonder: “If she pricked her belly, would it ooze?” – a train of thought that seems rather unlikely.
The conjuring of these inner monologues was, to me, one of the more grating elements of the book. In the sources, Harman admits that Merian left little writing behind, and that what did survive was technical and dry. “This makes trying to get into her head and conjure her voice all the more of a challenge,” he writes. Such limitations are not acknowledged within the text itself, however, and the blurring of fact and fiction distanced rather than connected me to his protagonists, leaving me unsure whether I was reading their words or Harman’s.
Harman’s ability to weave the cultural and scientific dimensions of scientific discovery is refreshing, although he does have a tendency to be grandiose about its implications. Writing about his newfound appreciation for his pregnant wife, he wonders: “Does a mayfly, too, feel the condition of its own existence, the evanescence of the one it loves?” Which seems a lot, intellectually, to ask of an insect.
Indeed, if there is a fault in this book, it is perhaps the tendency to impart significance to even the slightest hint of change. But maybe this is natural. As humans, we are among the most static of species. We do not sprout wings or revert to polyps. Yet, internally, we are always in a state of flux, and the planet is changing so quickly around us that we may be unable to adapt. Perhaps, then, it is its metaphorical possibilities that make metamorphosis so enticing in the first place. In the natural world, we can see how far the fabric might rupture while remaining, in essence, the same.
Metamorphosis: A Natural and Human History by Oren Harman. Basic Books, 2025. ISBN: 9781541607606
