Oren Harman on the Magic of Metamorphosis

I think that this question boils down to being able to discern when a danger is truly a danger and when a danger is really a bias. When a danger is a cultural bias, when a danger is down to, you know, views that we have that should that we should unpack and try to contextualize and try to be better about, be better people. And now the good fight. with Yasha Monk. There are some very basic puzzles about human nature and about the biological world that seem to challenge in some ways what you might expect on the basis of the theory of evolution.

Why is it, for example, that we are capable of great altruism, that some animals, like bees, are even more altruistic, sacrificing themselves for the queen bee with no realistic prospect of ever reproducing, when that should lead to those kind of characteristics dying out, since they are not fit, they do not make it likely that we will pass on our genes to the next generation. More broadly, why is it that we have so many animals, apparently up to two thirds of all animal species that undergo some form of metamorphosis? If nature wanted to create a butterfly, why start with a caterpillar? Well, my guest today is answering those questions in beautiful, really interesting books.

Orren Harman is a philosopher of science who has written very interesting books like The Price of Altruism and who has now published a new book called Metamorphosis, a Natural and Human History. And we don't just talk about biology and evolution and trying to answer some of those intriguing puzzles, we also talk about politics. What does our altruistic instinct do to us as humans? What is the distribution between people or sociopaths, people who are altruistic in a run-of-the-mill kind of way, people who are super altruists, who are more likely to sacrifice themselves for the good of a community than others, and perhaps people who are pathological altruists, who are altruistic in ways that are so extreme or so irrational that they may not actually serve

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