Olivia Judson, author of Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice To All Creation, has been writing a Times Select blog for the past couple of weeks, and doing a bang-up job of it. Her final post ends with a series of phenomena she finds perplexing, one of which I found so striking I wanted to post it here:
The first is metamorphosis. Everyone knows a caterpillar becomes a butterfly; and it is easy to work out why it might be useful to split your life between growing (caterpillar) and loving (butterfly). But what I find peculiar is the manner of becoming a butterfly: within the pupa, the caterpillar breaks down its body, including much of its brain, and reconstitutes itself along different lines. It's a kind of reincarnation. I'd love to know how this evolved.
So would I. Nature is teh weird.
