Jad Abumrad

And some of the cells rupture, and so their insides, the amino acids, the proteins, those all go floating out into space.

Wait, you're saying that the caterpillar just becomes like a soup of cells?

Yeah.

And yet somehow... This soup will magically be transformed into a butterfly or moth.

Well, how does that happen?

That question, that question is the big, fat, metaphysical, quasi-religious, semi-mystical, philosophical question that people have been asking forever.

This is Matthew Cobb.

He's a biologist and a historian.

And he says back in the 1600s, when naturalists saw that goo, they just thought, oh, well, clearly what's happening is that the caterpillar goes into the chrysalis.

And then it actually dies.

Totally dies.

This beautiful and completely new creature.

Death, as it were, and then a kind of resurrection.

That's Philip Clayton.

He's a philosopher from the Claremont School of Theology.

And he says, from the beginning, people thought about and wrote about metamorphosis as a kind of spiritual ascent.

It says somewhere in the New Testament, behold, the old has passed away, the new has surely come.

Basically, people saw the caterpillar as a symbol of our lowly, earthbound, lazy bodies, right?

And then the butterfly was sort of casting away all of that, and it represented our soul up in heaven, sort of in its most perfect form.

Never mind that butterflies actually like to eat.