Metamorphosis
On the Ship of Theseus, and being a frog
In some parts of the country, people have already begun to hear the chorus of frogs that assures us that Spring is coming. Most places, though, are still deep in Winter. The frogs know this, and they have nothing to say. Not yet.
Fast forward a few months. Past the thawing of the ponds, and the prolific outpourings of lusty frog song, deafening to those who wander close. Past the equally prolific extrusions of eggs out of frogs and into ponds. Fast forward past all of that, to the moment when those eggs have hatched.
Now. Imagine a pond in the middle of Spring and the middle of the continent, teeming with life, roiling below the surface with little black jobs zipping to and fro. They seem to be made up of nothing but big heads and slim powerful tails. Tadpoles. Pollywogs, if you will. Or even, if you are in Honduras and trying to fit in, bunbulun.
A young child arriving at this Spring pond will delight in the sheer life force on display. So many small lives indistinguishable from one another, at least on the basis of how they look. But watch for a while and see—this one shelters in a corner, that one seems to be doing laps, and that one over there gives chase whenever anyone else gets too close. They are different after all, each one an individual on its own path.
If the young child has come upon a pond such as this for the first time, and you say to her—those will turn into frogs—you may well be met with disbelief. A tadpole will turn into a frog? How is that even possible? And yet, children can also have a difficult time believing that they themselves will ever turn into adult humans. It seems an impossibility. There is too far to go.
That said, is it more difficult to accept that tadpoles will turn into frogs, or that tadpoles are frogs, and have been all along?
Such questions have caused philosophical angst, at least when it comes to objects made by men. Theseus, who is said to have slain the Minotaur and founded Athens, had a ship on some of his many heroic journeys which was, once he had more or less settled down, brought out for festivities. It was a hit, and so became a regular feature of the annual party. Rot does not stop even for our mythic heroes, though, and so, in the time between celebrations, a plank or two would be replaced. And then again the next year. And the next. After a time, every single piece of the ship of Theseus had been replaced. This prompted a question in some people’s minds: Is it in fact the same ship? Plutarch first posed this question in writing, and more than a millennium and a half later Thomas Hobbes picked the question back up. Can a ship that has had all of its material parts replaced, be understood to be the same ship now as it was when it was new? Some have compellingly argued that it is not—if all of the parts are different, the thing itself is now a different entity.
That boat and those boards, and therefore the identity that we ascribe to them, they may be meaningful to us, but they could not have come into existence without humans. The changing of boards on boats comes from without. The changing of tadpole into frog comes from within.
Frogs, unlike boats, are not made by men. Frogs exist whether we’re around to hear them or not. And their existence, wholly independent of human experience of them, extends to this truth as well: Within one anuran lifetime, a frog and a tadpole are the same individual.
We know this in part because we can watch it happen. Many frog eggs and tadpoles are so hearty that if we scoop them up and place them in an appropriate vessel, in which we can watch them and in which they can thrive, a majority of them will turn into frogs. The rest will not turn into anything vibrant at all.
We also know this—that a frog and a tadpole are the same—because in 1962, a biologist by the name of John Gurdon became the first person ever to clone a vertebrate, and the vertebrate that he cloned was that favorite of embryologists everywhere: Xenopus, the African clawed frog. Out of adult frog cells, Gurdon made tadpoles. In so doing, he demonstrated that adult frogs retain all the instructions necessary to make juvenile frogs, also known as tadpoles. In short, he demonstrated that tadpoles and frogs are the same.
We tend to pick one word to describe a thing, and in this case the word that we pick is frog, and it is therefore true that tadpoles are frogs. One is the child, the other the adult. Similarly, baby humans and teenaged humans and adult humans are all humans. As you are born and age and mature and become decrepit and ultimately die, you are all the same individual. You are both the same as you have always been, and also constantly changing.
Imagine that every single one of your childhood cells had been replaced by the time you became an adult. This is not, in fact, the case—while many of our cells do turnover quickly, some of our cell lines last as long as we do—but imagine for a moment that it were. Even in that case, with all of those new cells being materially of different stuff from the old cells, the instructions that they bear are of the same being. The instructions in those cells, and the lessons that they impart—deciding what to grow where and under what conditions—are what make identity. The boards of a ship don’t contain blueprints within them, but the cells of a human do.
Why frogs metamorphose at all is a big question, one without a simple or single answer. First off, not all frogs do metamorphose—some frogs hatch out of eggs looking like tiny versions of their adult selves, and just grow into larger beings over time, in what is known as direct development. Most frogs do have a tadpole stage though, and while exceptions abound, the typical way to go about being a frog is to lay eggs in water, which hatch out into aquatic tadpoles, which in time metamorphose into terrestrial frogs. The major change that such typical tadpoles must undergo as they become typical frogs is a move from water to land. This doesn’t sound easy, but I can assure you, it’s even harder than you think. Respiratory structures have to radically change—from gills to lungs—and so does the way that little Kermit gets around, from propelling himself through water with a powerful tail, to leaping over terra firma. What and how he eats is transformed—from filter feeding to active hunting—and even his senses must be retooled—his eyes and ears and skin—now that air is his medium, rather than water.
Humans do not metamorphose, but our adult forms are hardly what our child forms are. And why should they be? While we do not have to learn an entirely new way of being—to breathe air, to hop, to hunt with our tongues, as do frogs as they mature—we do have to learn how to be human, and that is no easy task. The vast majority of organisms on our planet don’t have to learn to be what they will become—they’re just on a path, canalized if you will, with no profound choices to be made. Go with the flow (plus have luck and selection on your side), and you become an adult.
Frogs do not have to learn how to be frogs. But humans do have to learn how to be human.
Of all of the species on the planet, our childhoods are the longest, relative to our lifespan. This is no error, no glitch in evolution that has us born so helpless that we can’t even turn ourselves over for months, and are so tied to parental love and care that it is well more than a decade before we can plausibly consider independence.
Our long, long childhoods provide the gift of time. Toddlers will not be kicked out of their natal home, and while they can be of more use than most American parents might imagine, most of what they are doing at this tender age is learning. Learning by watching and imitating. Learning by playing and innovating.
Our body form doesn’t change radically as we become adults—or at least, not as radically as that of tadpoles becoming frogs—but our abilities do. We are born with no language, and we become beings that write arias and take to the skies. Born without control over our own limbs, as adults we can harness chemical energy to bake perfect pastries, and harness atomic energy to, perhaps, fuel the ovens that bake the pastries, or perhaps, to destroy it all. Born with no skills at all, as adults we have nearly infinite choice and capacity.
Learning is what we do instead of metamorphosis.
Metamorphosis reveals potential. It reveals what was there all along, not yet ready, its time not yet come. Wait, and things will happen. Perhaps patience is something we should all spend more time developing. Perhaps we are all capable of a kind of metamorphosis, if only we pause a while, and wait and see.
This piece was first published early in 2024 in the 4th issue of County Highway, a truly excellent publication. I write their Field Notes column. If you do not know County Highway, do yourself a favor and become familiar with it. It is likely to be available in an independent book store, or music store, or feed store, near you (and if not—ask them if they’ll carry it—it is a very good deal for the retailers). Then, when you find how remarkable County Highway is, subscribe, and be ready for a delightful read every two months. County Highway is a newspaper that arrives on actual newsprint, ready for you to read it in front of a roaring fire, with a cup of coffee, or a glass of bourbon, or even both at the same time, if that is your jam.
(You must supply the fire, the coffee, and the bourbon.)
I did not know that there were frogs hatched as terrestrial quadrupeds. The variety of nature is endless and endlessly fascinating. A human can (theorically) have all its parts replaced and still be the same human through the continuity of consciousness. I presume memory provides the same continuity in animals less conscious than ourselves (less self conscious?). But what of things? Many of the devices I count on day to day have parts replaced even if not all the parts have been replaced yet. Are they the same? Is the river that is always different still the same river? Or is this just another example of "incompleteness" such as exists in mathematics?
As for replacing the boards on the ship, the ship has no awareness, so the ship doesn't care. It's up to us to decide if we are seeing a new ship, or the old ship. I think it can be both at once.
I've restored my old Victorian house. It is partly of the people of a century ago, and party of me. It is neither one nor the other, but both.