Enter the Butterfly: What Science Can Reveal About Our Own Fragile Self-Conceptions

Do you know what butterfly metamorphosis looks like? It’s not like what happens to a tadpole. Spindly legs and rainbow wings don’t just poke their way out of a cocooned caterpillar’s body. What happens is that after caterpillars encase themselves in a chrysalis, they dissolve (or nearly dissolve; this depends on the species). If you cut their chrysalis open at this moment, all that will come out of most is a splat of runny goo: a baby bug liquefied, an old life gone forever.

The sight is horrifying. It looks so much like death that for centuries naturalists thought that’s exactly what it was. Metamorphosis looked like resurrection. Theologians claimed that it was God’s way of proving the Jesus thing was possible.

The truth of how metamorphosis actually works is different, yet in my mind it’s equally miraculous. The liquid itself is a bunch of digestive enzymes. Within the liquid of the chrysalis, invisible to the eye, are tiny cell clusters called imaginal discs.

Using the enzymes as fuel, the imaginal cells begin to multiply, forming wings and legs and a brain and eyes, and from there the whole body of a butterfly.

Just a decade ago, Georgetown University biologist Martha Weiss discovered that some of these imaginal cells contain the caterpillar’s memories, holding the wisdom of the past through the dissolution of the present and into a transformed future. The chrysalis is perhaps not, then, a living metaphor for resurrection, but for hope: how it becomes microscopic in times of trauma and loss; how it is no less present or powerful for being so tiny. Life and memory find a way to endure amid gross, frightening entropy, the near-total breakdown of the familiar. We can’t make out the past or begin to imagine the future at this moment of dissolution, but thanks to Dr. Weiss and other biologists’ work over the past sixty years, we know that the seeds of it are in there, floating in the muck.

We like to frame the world in stories, and we tend to think they should progress logically. Yet the butterfly shows us otherwise. It reveals that, much like our own realities, a story can dissolve into goo in the middle and end up as a completely different animal. And in that, it is also a microcosm for so much of science as a whole. Sometimes we get exactly what we expect. But much of the time, we don’t. Science has a way of ensuring reality intrudes, whether we like it or not, and ultimately that’s a good thing. It helps us evaluate our lives in the context of the world that is, not amid the false worlds we are prone to construct.

Among its lessons, science shows us that we live in a world that can’t handle unchecked growth. Ever. Our bodies aren’t meant to handle it; our planet isn’t meant to handle it; and our civilization can’t sustain it, whether we’re talking about the economy, development, or anything else. We’ve spent two centuries—initially in the West, now all over the world—trying to pretend otherwise, and look where that has gotten us. Scientist and author Hope Jahren aptly labeled it The Story of More, but sooner or later the world requires stories of less. It was never true that growth can just keep rolling along. And that’s why the caterpillar has something so important to teach us: on this planet, healthy growth, hopeful growth, involves disintegration as well.

My own moment of disintegration arrived on a gray November day, sitting with my wife, Diana, in the radiology waiting room of a Colorado children’s hospital, her hand threatening to crush the bones in mine. Our daughter, Neva, still lay somewhere beyond the double doors and their Do Not Enter warning. Every atom in our bodies struggled to break that command when a pediatric oncologist with kind eyes sat beside us and uttered those seven words about Neva’s MRI.

More words followed. They included tumor in the pituitary gland and will require brain surgery to remove.

Somehow, I processed this information and even found a way to ask pertinent questions. I did this because while I silently begged and hoped and prayed that the news would be different, the realization this was coming was already lodged in my gut. The data pointed the way. A set of X-rays showed that she had the bones of a toddler. She couldn’t do many of the normal things on a playground that her peers could. She was getting multiple headaches each month. None of it was normal for a four-year-old. Though cautioned against it, I took that information and googled and read and pulled articles from the primary literature until I arrived at yet another word: craniopharyngioma. In some terrible way, I was prepared. There are times when I wish the scientist in me would go away.

The oncologist had arrived in the radiology waiting room with a team of residents in tow. I remember wondering how they all felt as they sought us out. Did it become routine, this doling out of eviscerating news? Or did they approach a parent with knots in their own stomachs, perhaps deliberately welcoming in just a bit of the impending pain in hopes that it could lessen the blow, if only a little. The residents all looked unsure of themselves, perhaps still figuring out the complex emotional calculus of it all, but as I looked at the attending oncologist, I remember thinking, This man does not leave his humanity behind.

He told us the MRI tech called him while the scan was in progress, letting him know there was clearly a lesion of some kind in my daughter’s brain. That gave us the chance to absorb the initial blow without Neva present, but suddenly I had an overwhelming need to see her.

Can we go back now?

Yes, of course. And please remember that we still need the official radiology read. But I’m nearly certain this is a cranio. A follow-up CT scan will confirm. Go see her and get some food, and then come up to the seventh floor and we can discuss next steps.

A nurse ushered us through the doors and along a row of mobile beds. A boy of about twelve lay in one, with sullen eyes fixed on the TV. A baby was in the next one, wailing as a nurse bent over the bed. Neva was in the last bed, an IV still in her arm, electric leads from her chest to a monitor above. Her thick brown hair was a tangle, her blue eyes open but glassy.

Mama.

My wife brushed back a lock of her own dark hair and laid a hand on Neva’s chest, kissed her head, and told her everything was okay. The similarities between the two of them were striking. Big eyes that danced with deliberate mischief, enormous smiles, minds that typically raced ahead of everyone else. A constant tendency to question the standard narrative. As Christmas approached the year before Neva’s diagnosis, when she was only three, she sprang a trap on us in the form of a logical proof.

Mama, how does Santa get on the roof? Well, he flies there with his reindeer.

But isn’t flying kind of magic? Well, yes, I suppose it is.

But, Mama, if Santa is magic and magic isn’t real, then Santa can’t be real.

Even at birth, Neva emerged from her mother with a calm and skeptical look beneath a shock of dark hair, as she regarded her suddenly expanded world with an air of critical assessment. The delivery nurse had to force her to cry.

There was a double frame on our mantel at home that held pictures of Diana and Neva at the age of three. Neva wore a bright red dress with stripes on the sleeves, while the other picture of Diana in a patterned jumper was faded by the years. But absent the markers of time, the two little girls were nearly indistinguishable. Friends would look at my wife and daughter and make jokes about an immaculate conception, or perhaps say something like:

Clearly biology is wrong, and genetics is not fifty-fifty. Sometimes following that with a smiling, Thank God.

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Excerpted from the book This Ordinary Stardust: A Scientist’s Path from Grief to Wonder by Alan Townsend. Copyright © 2024. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.