Butterflies and Human Development

1750 words, 8 minute read

You’ve heard about the famous Borneo Butterfly, the one who flapped its wings and closed O’Hare Airport for 4 hours. It’s called the Butterfly Effect; and this is not that!

Nature is a many-splendored thing! All life on Earth is descended from a single DNA molecule, synthesized about 4 billion years ago. That single molecule is responsible for the enormous variety of life forms, from primates to parrots and poplars to plankton, in our biosphere. Some of us breathe oxygen, some carbon dioxide; a few of us prefer methane. Different strokes! 

30 trillion cells, representing more than 200 distinct cell types (tissues), coordinate their activities to create a symbiotic environment for themselves and to support a single meta-organism, i.e. you! The individual cells reproduce and the meta-organism they support also reproduces.

The key to life’s success is its ability to adapt and evolve as it reproduces. It all begins, of course, with the auto-reproductive double helix, but after that the world is only limited by the breadth of Nature’s imagination: meiosis and mitosis, sexual and asexual reproduction, symbiosis and endosymbiosis, etc.

But nothing is more inventive than the lowly butterfly whose maturation process includes old fashioned Ovidian Metamorphosis …the transformation of a frog into a prince, a girl into a tree (Ovid), a caterpillar into a butterfly, or as we will see shortly, a cherubic child into a teen terror. Here’s how Claude (Anthropic) describes the process:

“It all begins when a butterfly lays an egg on a plant. The egg contains all the genetic instructions for the entire life cycle. When the egg hatches, out comes a caterpillar — the larval stage. It munches on leaves almost constantly, shedding its skin (molting) several times as it grows. 

“Once the caterpillar has eaten enough and grown sufficiently, it forms a protective casing around itself called a chrysalis (not a cocoon — that's for moths). Inside, the caterpillar's body essentially dissolves itself. When the caterpillar seals itself inside the chrysalis, it releases digestive enzymes that break down most of its own body tissues — muscles, organs, and fat — into a nutrient-rich liquid, a kind of biological soup. 

“This process is called histolysis (histo = tissue, lysis = breaking down). At its most extreme, the interior of the chrysalis really does become something close to a cellular slurry. Remarkably, certain clusters of cells survive this process and use the nutrients from the dissolved tissue as raw material to build entirely new structures: wings, antennae, compound eyes, legs, and all the other features of an adult butterfly.

“Once histolysis is complete, the reverse process — histogenesis — begins. After one to several weeks (depending on the species), the adult butterfly emerges from the chrysalis. It pumps fluid into its crumpled wings to expand them, waits for them to dry and harden, and then takes flight. The adult's main purpose is reproduction — finding a mate and laying eggs to start the cycle again. 

“Some studies suggest butterflies retain memories from their caterpillar stage, hinting that despite the dramatic physical overhaul, there is some biological continuity between the two forms.

“True histolysis — where tissues are broken down into a nutrient slurry — appears to be exclusive to holometabolous insects: butterflies, flies, beetles, bees, wasps, ants, and fleas; this specific mechanism doesn't appear to have evolved independently in any other animal lineage that we know of.”

However, there is at least one other organism that relies on a species of metamorphosis as a key component of its maturation process: Homo Sapiens. 

We enter the world like a house on fire. As they say in Texas, we’re ‘all process no content’…but we absorb data quickly and we sort it continuously. As we grow, we develop a functional map of the world and we come to understand our place in it – just in time for puberty to shake the etch-a-sketch, wiping out the image entirely.

We start over but now with a different focus. Before puberty, we’re all about Nature, i.e. the World. We drink in data like a sponge and build ‘ice cream castles in the air’ (Joni Mitchell). There is no proposition too outlandish for us to entertain and if those propositions are logically contradictory or physically impossible, so what? It’s our Golden Age…if only we were old enough to enjoy it.

Puberty turns us inside-out, literally! We are no longer interested in ‘this stupid world’; we are now hyper focused on the Self. The data we funneled during our first 12 years is now laser focused on just one subject: me! (What else?) Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? What is to become of me? And oh yeah, Who am I?

Twelve agonizingly introspective years later, just as we’re perfecting our Narcissism – and loving every minute of it - the mirror shatters. Somehow and without realizing it, you’ve let the nose of an ‘Other’ into our hermetically sealed tent. You have a life partner, maybe children, a job, perhaps even a career, and bills to pay. Congratulations, you made it onto the treadmill; welcome to the rat race!

We no longer see ourselves (↓), we still can’t see out into the world (↑), now we can only look side-to-side (↔); we can only see ‘other people’ – i.e. folks who share our predicament. Our focus now: Society! 

If your level of mental activity going forward is not what it once was, you are to be forgiven. There are contacts to be made, clubs to join, a golf swing to perfect; there are diapers to change and children to educate; there is a ‘check book’ to balance, a mortgage to pay, and a 401k to grow. There are career and corporate ladders you must climb all the while preparing your own teenagers to become responsible adults, just like you.

The whole scenario would be horrific…if you were conscious of it. Be thankful for little mercies: you’re not! You party hardy (Wayne’s World). You exact revenge by living well (The Great Gatsby). You root for the home side and take pride in their triumphs. Meanwhile, without a shred of malice you screw up your marriage, your children, your career and oftentimes your health. And then what? And when what? 

You’re more than ready for Stage Four, but here things get tricky. Some folks get to Stage Four in midlife; I’m in awe. Many others, I am afraid to say, never get there at all or, if they do, when they do, they don’t realize they’re ‘not in Kansas (Stage Three) anymore’ (Wizard of Oz). Most of the rest of us get there but much later than we would have liked...at least in retrospect. 

So a belated Welcome to Stage Four! Your mission now, should you choose to accept it, is to focus on God (substitute ‘higher power’, Gaia, or negative vacuum pressure, if you prefer). I say ‘God’ because I mean to refer to what is beyond this fickle World, this sorry Self, and even this Other but includes, integrates, transcends, and perhaps even redeems them all.

You began life focused on Nature, the World; you matured past that on to an unholy obsession with your Self. Then, for better or worse, something distracted you. Was it a glint of light off a gemstone, the sparkle of gold, or the allure of an attractive member of your preferred gender? Something made you lift your head and so for the next umpteen years you looked only to the right or to the left. “No more cosmos, no more self!” You found Society! 

So far, we’ve marched in lock step with our cohort. 12 years of the World, 12 years of the Self, and now Society – but for how many years this time? Let’s break it down. A very few of you will make the transition to Stage Four as young adults, many more will opt-in as part of a midlife crisis. Society tells us that we ‘owe it 40 years’ so Age 65 is a popular stepping off point. But lately 65 has become 72 and 72 has become 80. 

How come? Economics plays a part, of course; but also, many people resist the transition from Stage Three to Stage Four. Even after Society has lost interest in them and moved on, they embarrass themselves by clinging to the last vestiges of their social identities. It is truly pathetic but eventually even they succumb. 

Then there’s Team Alamo! These dinosaurs both dread and despise Stage Four. They do not believe that the contradictions of the early stages can be resolved in a higher synthesis. They are content to leave things as they are. Live and die, one and done, end of.

We have mistakenly treated the Stages of Human Development (e.g. Erikson) as a product of steady organic maturation. We need to jettison that model. What’s going on here is genuine metamorphosis, a repeating cycle of histolysis-histogenesis. 

We are holometabolous – not on the DNA level of course; but at each of life’s phase changes, our rigid personalities, like a caterpillar’s genes, dissolve into a soup, where the traits are reassembled according to an entirely different schematic. We are just like a butterfly…or a Transformer: one minute we are Optimus Prime, next we are his supersonic spacecraft. 

After birth and before dying, most of us will undergo three nearly total reassemblies (c. ages 12, 25, and 65). We are likely to experience each as a catastrophe…and so it is; but each is also an opportunity. This is especially so of the final reshuffle. Now for the first time, we are empowered to take charge of our own evolution. 

We’ve waited (albeit unknowingly) for 65+ years for this. We should welcome, not avoid it, cherish, not resist, and make the most of it we can. After all, now that you know the World, the Self, and Society, why not get to know God (or a vegan substitute)? “The chance won’t come again!” (Bob Dylan) 

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Odilon Redon Butterflies (1910) is an oil‑on‑canvas painting in which Redon presents butterflies as delicate, dreamlike forms floating in a luminous, atmospheric space, reflecting his shift toward vivid color and contemplative natural subjects. The work embodies Symbolism, using butterflies as metaphors for transformation and poetic reverie, and is housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.