by Eve Hindes and Stefan Ambrose
Lightly edited by Nathaniel and Craig. Transcribed by Stefan. This interview was conducted during Craig’s Fall course in the M.C. Richards Program and focused on the book Do Frogs Come From Tadpoles by C. Holdrege, (Evolving Science Association, 2017).
Eve Hindes [EH]: Thank you Craig for coming to talk to us today.
Craig Holdrege [CH]: Glad to be here.
EH: You are an educator and author, phenomenologist and Goethean scientist, as well as a parent and person in wonder and awe of the world, and you can really see that in the way you’ve been teaching us about all kinds of creatures and their environments in the last couple of days, as well as this piece of writing you’ve done here. One of the first questions we have for you is: When did you first fall in love with frogs?
CH: I don’t know if I’m in love with frogs.
Stefan Ambrose [SA]: Sounds like you’re in love with frogs.
CH: I’m definitely fascinated by frogs. It’s kind of hard to say, I don’t actually know. When I was in college and had to dissect a frog, I wasn’t in love with them. I mean, I did it and I learned quite a bit about muscles, but that frog wasn’t really a frog. Later, in teaching zoology as a high school teacher, the metamorphosis of the tadpole into the frog became interesting to me when I realized: They don’t lose their tail, they digest their tail. I thought, okay this is strange. So it was in learning about the metamorphosis of the tadpole into the frog that I started to become really interested in them. Then it kind of waned; I’ve always enjoyed seeing frogs, and having moved here you have all kinds of frogs in the spring—early spring peepers and the wood frogs that are heralds of the spring. The chorus they make in the evening in March and April is amazing. I started observing more. So it was a gradual process. Not gradual, it was sporadic. I never really focused again on frogs until I started doing the research for this booklet. That was a number of years ago. Five years ago or something like that.
EH: Just for everyone here, I’m just wondering if it would be alright with you if I just give a little description of the tadpole becoming frog. And feel free to jump in at any point if I misspeak or if you think that I have left out something important.
CH: Please.
EH: Now it is fall and the frogs are doing their thing, but in the spring, for all the people here, imagine you’re walking here in the spring, and it’s still pretty cold, and things are just starting to appear and come up from the ground, and the bodies of water are beginning to thaw. You may come across a pond at this point. When I was little, it was great fun to go to the ponds and to find these globs on the edges of the pond, there’d be these big chunks of goop, and the game was to find the biggest one. You can imagine you go to the pond, and you find one of these, and maybe you lift it out of the water, and you notice this glob is actually a lot of small orbs, and in the center of each orb is a smaller dark, almost black, orb and you’ll set it back into the water. Maybe you’ll go on another walk a couple of weeks later, and you may find the same glob, but there’s no longer the same orb in the center, but in the water you’ll see from a couple dozen to a couple hundred of these small tadpoles in the water. They are very fishlike. They have a spherical body, and a mouth and little eyes on the sides of their head and a finned tail, and they move very quickly. and they’re living into their environment and feeding on plant life. Around here I think all frogs feed on plant life, but that is not the case for some of them. As the water warms, a few months go by, and a good deal of tadpoles stay in the form of a tadpole; for some it is up to two to three years. Then the frog will begin to appear, coming out of the tadpole. And it’s amazing, because they don’t lose the tail, as you said, it gets sucked in, digested into the body, and they rebuild and recycle their entire bodies to become this frog. And the frog, as you know, makes noise, yet the tadpole doesn’t have vocal cords, and the frog will make a whole chorus of noise, so it also hears. It’s developing ears and vocal cords. The eyes become bulbous on top of the head, and they start developing hind legs, having four legs, and the tail disappears into the body. It will begin to eat things other than just plant life, like insects, and for that it will need a tongue and a whole new digestive system. Which is insane! Because the big question is, how and why does it do this?
Towards the end of the first chapter you talk about how science tries to separate out this “activity.” They will point out that “It’s just the DNA that’s doing it” or “It’s the hormones!” But you really go into the fact that all creatures that are developing will have hormones and DNA but no tadpole will grow up to become a horse or a cow or anything like that, it’s going to become a frog, and emerge from this tadpole. So, I’m wondering, why do you think in science they separate out this activity? What is the point of trying to separate out the environment and activity, instead of viewing the frog as a being in relationship with its life process and environment?
CH: That’s an interesting question. It’s a fact that when you study biology, physiology, and developmental processes today, people raise the question—and you’re supposed to think in this way—what causes something to happen? The cause needs to be something that you can determine, that without it, the process doesn’t happen, or if you change it, the process goes differently. These are called in biology today the underlying mechanisms or a mechanistic explanation. There is an urge that has arisen in the history of science, in modern science, to look for causes in this way in biology. It’s almost taken for granted that this is what science is. It’s presupposed that if you’re doing biology, that’s what you’re doing. You’re looking for the causes, and the causes are discreet physical entities. One imagines DNA or thyroid hormone as something that is in the organism and when the genes are active in a particular way, or when the thyroid hormone is secreted, they initiate the process of metamorphosis in the frog. And, I don’t think anyone could deny that and there have been lots of experiments to show that. Scientists then talk about causes.
It’s also the case that thyroid hormone does not have the same effect in different organs of the animal. So, there is always a sort of conversation with itself, where a substance arises, and in that relationship some organs do this and some organs do that, all in relationship with the fact that this is now an organism that is in transformation. It seems to me that the search for causes limits our understanding. You’ll find interesting things, but, what one finds becomes for me part of the overall picture of how something develops. Just because you can manipulate metamorphosis by changing the hormones does not mean you understand the integrated nature of the transformation from tadpole to frog. To understand that you have to look at all the phenomena in their interrelations, otherwise, for me, it is not understanding. It is the ability to manipulate. And, those are two different things.
SA: And it sounds like it comes to being because of its relationship to the environment, naturally. Even if we can use thyroid hormone as some causal agent, to manipulate or cause transformation, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to understand how this arose through time and space, this being in relationship to its environment.
CH: That’s right.
EH: I think you touch on that when you talk about a desert frog of some sort that has tadpoles, and some of them, from the same mother, will become carnivorous and feed on tiny shrimp.
CH: In the desert!
EH: Yeah, in the desert! There are shrimp in puddles and some of these tadpoles will become carnivorous and feed on these shrimp, and sometimes other tadpoles of the same family. And if there aren’t enough shrimp in the pond, or the body of water, that same tadpole may change its diet and go back to eating algae again.
CH: And it changes its whole form too. If they start feeding on shrimp they become different from those that start feeding on algae. It’s the same species. There is a remarkable plasticity in relation to the environment that they’re living in. That’s an extreme example of very interesting frogs that are called spadefoot toads for some reason. They live in Arizona and northern Mexico and places like that. They live at least nine months under the ground as adult frogs, usually in dry areas, and when it gets a little bit wet they come up and lay their eggs—quickly. All this happens really fast in a puddle that’s going to dry up soon. So, it’s a remarkable adaptation to circumstances.
EH: That really touches on the relationship the frog has to its environment. If you were to look at that from the perspective of hormones or DNA, there’s not really a solid explanation for that. It seems it’s really about the tadpole and frog as a being, and how it exists and will be changed at all times by its environment.
“Scientists feel that what they call “causes” are explanations of the phenomena… That’s what they call an explanation? It doesn’t satisfy me.”
CH: And certainly you could learn something by looking at the hormones, by looking at the DNA. I’m never against that kind of inquiry. Because you found x, y, or z, and you change one of those factors and the process changes, does not mean you are understanding the whole process. Scientists feel that what they call “causes” are explanations of the phenomena. For good or bad reasons, this has never made sense to me. It never made sense to me, from ninth grade on; that’s when I remember thinking about this for the first time. That’s what they call an explanation? It doesn’t satisfy me. There is an interesting issue there: What we feel to be adequate as an explanation. I speak more about understanding. It starts when I feel like I’ve entered into the web of relationships to a degree, that I get a little bit of a sense of what’s overall going on. Of course not everything, but something.
SA: Right, and this leads into the next section of the book that was for me really riveting. You give this great portrayal of the frog, which seems distinct from other kinds of literature that might analyze the frog in a reductive way, and one might think, “How have you, and others, come to this way of being in relationship to the frog, such that you begin to perceive the activity?” What are these interrelating factors that actually make a thing what it is, that create and define metamorphoses, give the ability for something to metamorphose? As opposed to saying, “The thyroid hormones have caused this.”
You say at the end of the second chapter: “A science of beings moves beyond certain habits of mind that constrain our perception and understanding, it requires a different way of researching than is prevalent today. When nature becomes a presence and we have been touched by another being, we also honor that presence, that being. This connection forms the basis for greater insight, and importantly, for an ethical relationship to the natural world. A science of beings is a science that connects.”
I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about the role, and the necessity, of this intimacy in connection to the beings that we’re studying, and especially to the 7-fold process in that chapter that you describe as a biology of being? This seems like a paradigm that has these incremental layers that bring us into this form of relationship, this form of connection. Why is that relationship and connection so important to a developing science?
CH: It’s an interesting question, and not so easy to answer. While you were speaking, I was thinking: There are people who are in one way very materialistic in thinking about things, really dedicated to seeking cause-and-effect explanations, and they have the most warm-hearted relationship to animals and plants, and are proponents of biodiversity and really good people. Right? And, sometimes I feel a little bit of a disconnect between their thoughts and their feelings. Maybe they have a greater intimacy with animals than I have, because they’re field biologists and are always out there with them, and love it, and that’s great! On the other hand, if you ask them to explain the things, it's as if the animal turns into a complex mechanism. That discrepancy always felt wrong to me. I felt I could not see the things the way they are if I make them into a mechanism. I don’t deny that people who have the more mechanistic view can’t have a relationship. But the relationship is not enough. That’s interesting, right? It’s not enough. Certainly, it is a presupposition to be a good person in the world—to honor the other. It is really important! But then: Can I honor it to a degree that I’m really willing to transform my way of knowing to adapt to the way the creature is showing itself? Or am I not doing that because I’m imposing a certain framework on it? I think that kind of sensitivity is what’s key. That’s why in some contexts I speak of this approach as a dialogue, as a conversation. You are listening—not literally—but you are listening to what’s trying to show itself there, and then you’re adapting your way of knowing to what you’re discovering. That’s an ongoing dialectical process that you engage in. You are becoming different, and your way of knowing is becoming different as you’re engaging.
SA: So, maybe not step by step, but as a first principle, there’s this engagement. You are getting to know a being, you’re seeing it, you’re seeing its activity, you’re seeing its form. And then you begin to free yourself, the second principle, from the mental constraints, the boundaries, the things that we’ve predetermined, so that you can go back and engage with it again. To see more, see a little bit more. Then you begin to picture in your mind, a third principle. What is this being? So it begins to live in you, internally we start to develop, in this case, a “frogness.” So that each time we come back to this being of the frog, we get to see a little bit more because, in a way, we’re beginning to speak its language. Then we begin to compare. In this chapter you also compare the frog with the salamanders, the caecilians.
CH: The caecilians are wormlike amphibians that are quite strange, that you’ve never seen—and I’ve never seen—they are described in the literature.
SA: I was reading this and was like: “Where do these exist, I don’t think this is real.”
CH: They’re evidently real!
SA: So you begin to compare, because by comparing the frog with other beings in the same family more and more distinctions are beginning to pile up. We’re developing this memory of what it means to be a frog. Then the fifth principle, intuition. The intuition that begins to reveal things about the animal that we couldn’t have seen if we were just studying the mechanisms.
CH: Yes.
SA: And that feels really important and related to what you were saying—that an intimacy to the frog develops, like “I love the frog!” This isn’t quite enough. When we begin to actually speak the language of the frog, and intuit the frog, we begin to know more about the frog. And that becomes a science that instead of getting deeper and deeper mechanistically into what it means to be a frog, we begin to intuit the activity, things we couldn’t have seen before. And then we have the ability to portray it, another principal, for others, so they can access these intuitions for themselves. You mention that even if we portray a being, that doesn’t mean that through a portrayal that we’re actually giving someone knowledge, or that we’re giving someone the experience of what a frog is. We’re just creating almost an architecture, or an experience, where someone can, of their own volition, of their own capacities, decide for themselves what a frog is. And you say this requires some finesse—how to portray something well. And then, we can go back—not just as scientists and people practicing this method, but also as someone who has maybe read one of your portrayals—go back to the frog again and see more and more. So this really is a developing process. It sounds like in the traditional mechanistic scientific community there are, gradually, more who are seeing the limitations of strictly reductive research, but still something is missing.
CH: Yes, and I think a lot of scientists who are doing this kind of work carry these things that I’m trying to work with in a more unconscious way. They’re synthesizing, they’re seeing relationships, they’re seeing things in a more holistic way than they are perhaps articulating—and that they’re, very frankly, allowed to articulate, right? If you want to get a scientific article published, you have to do it in a very particular way. Otherwise, you’re gone. If you’re going to be an academic, you’ve got to publish, or you will perish. And, so, you’ve got to fit a specific form. And there are so many wonderful, really incredible people studying animals and plants around the world, that are not only full of heart, but are also full of observations, and the understanding of relationships. Unfortunately, there is a superstructure throughout the scientific community, and through what has become tradition, that everything has to be interpreted in a certain way if it is going to be accepted by the community. So there’s a certain sadness that I have about that. But I don’t want to be critical of the individuals doing that work, because they’re doing good work. I mean, you can have your questions, for example, about animal experimentation and all these kind of things. I have my big questions. You know, what are we doing to animals in laboratories to prove something, messing around with their brains, or this, or that? You can have real questions about that kind of work.
EH: Why do you think it’s important for this way of viewing animals as beings to be, I guess, permeated into the world of science, and what do you think the effects in a societal way would be if scientists were allowed to approach these matters with heart first?
“This turning towards the concrete in the world and training our capacities to be able to deal with complex, dynamic situations is, I think, where we need to go as humanity.”
CH: I think we would simply become better and better at always understanding things in their dynamic relations. That’s what it’s about. Ecology as a science is the science of relationships. And yet, it has become, for example, so data driven. Where you’re starting with such high level abstractions, and then the only things that you can say relate to data that is deemed statistically significant. So, you have a statistical analysis of something, and say, “well, that may be a trend.” A statistical trend towards this or that. You can’t say anything really about the individual case. Right? And so this turning towards the concrete in the world and training our capacities to be able to deal with complex, dynamic situations is, I think, where we need to go as humanity. And this is one way to help develop those capacities. That’s the one side. I think we just need more and more of those kinds of capacities in order to address how we are in the world, and what we’re doing with the world.
On the other side, I just think if people were learning biology more in this way there would be more of a sense of the fact that this is a planet that we should be taking care of and not exploiting. There is also a danger in environmental classes, and in schools, of focusing children too early on all the problems we’re causing rather than first letting them get a sense for the wonders of the world, to let them fall in love with the world concretely. To know the world. I think this is especially important today where we are so screen focused. That we actually have hands-on, minds-on, senses-on experiences of the natural world. So that we’re rooted in the world. In this world. Not only rooted in Google and Facebook.
SA: This feels like the perfect transition into the last section of the book where you begin to tackle the condensation of the beings of the world into symbols, into things. For instance, the idea that we can determine or say, “The human being comes from the chimpanzee.” Why would we say such a thing? Do we even have evidence to say something like this? You begin to look at this idea that none of the specific traits in the human, none of the activity of the human, can you actually find in the fossil record of the chimpanzee. When we look at the fossil record, the picture only grows in complexity. It doesn’t become more clear. So, why would we say something like “human beings come from chimpanzees,” or, that “the frog comes from the tadpole,” when nothing of the frog exists within the tadpole? It sounds like this condensing of the educational experience to this symbolic, data driven process, it’s almost that that’s the only option. We can only really see the physical, skeletal remains, “that’s what we must come from.”
EH: It really separates out beings themselves. If you look at a fossil, you’re just looking at it like it’s a thing, not as a unique part of history and evolution.
SA: So then you start to explore a polarity. We have evidence of the created being in the form of, for instance, a fossil, or, for instance, when looking at a tadpole and just seeing, “Okay here’s a tadpole and here’s a fog.” Just the structure and, of course, there are mechanical realities to that, and you make sure to say you’re advocating for a science that doesn’t throw out research that is looking into things like the thyroid hormone. But on the other side of this polarity, there’s what you call, a “creative being, creative activity, agency, a being at work.” And anytime you focus on the one side of this polarity you start to lose the picture of what a being really is. Could you define and contextualize what these three phrases mean—creative activity, agency, a being-at-work?
CH: No, I can’t define them.
SA: I was expecting this! Because right after he says this, he says, “well, language isn’t important!” But, then these phrases appear over and over! They do seem indicative of a way of thinking that’s important.
“We’re forming, our bodies are forming through activity that achieves form, and the forms are always being re-formed. Every organismic process is like this.”
CH: You remember we talked about the beaver twelve days ago. I gave a portrayal of the beaver and then we looked at the teeth, the growing incisors, and how the incisors continue to grow, and at the same time they’re being worn down constantly as the animal is gnawing. I don’t remember who of you it was that realized, “the animal is a kind of activity.” It is “formed," but it’s also always “forming.” Think of what we just talked about this morning with human development in the bones, for instance the feet. We’re forming, our bodies are forming through activity that achieves form, and the forms are always being re-formed. Every organismic process is like this. The re-formation is slow, or it can be rapid, like in the development of the tadpole to the frog, where everything gets broken down and reorganized within a week. That this aquatic creature becomes that hopping creature. So this is where, if you follow the processes, you begin to see the animal is everywhere activity. It’s everywhere activity. Plants are activity in their own way too. It’s a different story, but we’re focusing on animals here. So, everywhere you can look, at every structure—as reflection of an activity. The skin is continually being replaced. We have all new red blood cells within 120 days. So, ongoing activity of the organism: that’s the one side. That’s what I’m calling agency, or using “creative activity,” which sometimes rubs people the wrong way—the creative part, I’ll come back to that in a second.
“Being-at-work” is a translation of Aristotle. That I got from an interesting newer translation of Aristotle by a person named Joe Sachs. He translates Aristotle’s term “energeia,” (where we get “energy” from) as “being at work.” An organism is a being-at-work. A being is a doing. To be a human being is to be a doing. To be a frog is to be a doing frog.
But, it’s also a formed frog. So, that’s what you were saying is the polarity, right? Because if I only think activity all the time, then I lose track of the fact that I wake up tomorrow and I’ve still got the same feet, I’ve got the same fingerprints. There’s something that stays somewhat the same. But, it’s staying the same, not because it’s some dead architecture, but because—not because, that’s not even the right word, it’s not a because—its “staying the same” is being continually created. And this is what Aristotle called “entelechy.” The entelechy, it’s something Sachs translates as “being-at-work-staying-itself.” It’s ingenious the way he translated this actually. It’s much more concrete than just saying “entelechy,” a term that might lead you to think of some “thing,” rather than a doing. The organism is an active being, always at work.
Why is this important? Because in the way we look at evolution, we have always a tendency to look at it from the point of view of the past. And also in development: “The tadpole turned into the frog” or “the ape, or monkey, turned into Ardipithecus, and Ardipithecus turned into Australopithecus, etc.” So you’re always looking at a kind of molding from the past. When you’re looking at mechanisms, the past is always determining the present. Right? It’s always past oriented. The moment you start looking at activity, then you’re seeing—you know—the frog is something new. When something starts to walk upright and has a skeleton for uprightness, that’s new. You cannot deduce that from the past. There’s no way to get from the study alone of a creature that is not yet upright and is monkey-like to the form of the upright posture. You could not know from those early “Lucy”-type skulls (Australopithecus afarensis), what the modern human skull is going to look like. It’s not in there. So, where does it come from? Does the author answer that question? [laughing] I don’t think so.
SA: Well, I think it’s interesting. What you’re characterizing is a physical ancestor. There is something that came before us. That determined in many ways the shape we could take and the boundaries that we would meet in our development. However, there’s something else, that, as you say, did not come from what came before us. It manifested within the stream of life that we are the latest aspect of. And, that that’s a really important reframing of the process. And while the answer to that question may still be unanswered, the fact that we’re now looking at it from this new perspective, that is living, maybe we’ll start to find, within the complexity of the growing fossil record, maybe, instead of developing more confusion and making more and more theoretical claims, we’ll begin to find more and more life and meaning. We’ll begin to know ourselves a little bit more, actually.
CH: Right. Thank you. That was nicely put.
EH: At the conclusion of the third chapter, before the acknowledgments, there’s a passage that we felt brought everything together and raised some really good questions:
“When we study evolution, we are consciously connecting with the whole of life—the life, with which we are also connected through evolution. In this sense, evolution is reflecting back on itself in the minds of human beings. But, this reflection itself is a creative activity; it is not a given. The more I study evolution, the more I see the boundaries we put in the way of an expansive and deeper understanding. But I also see that we can move beyond those boundaries. It becomes ever clearer that our understanding of evolution will evolve to the degree that we evolve in our capacity to see evolution as a creative activity.”
SA: This just feels like a mic drop statement. And also like a meditation. I’d like you to talk about it. When I first read this, I was like, “What?” Then I read it again, and I was like, “Wow.” In other words, to the extent that we’re looking at the activity in life, and not just the created being, or, for instance, the fossil record, the material mechanisms of something; to the extent that we’re recognizing the activity surrounding us in our interrelationships, we are evolution looking at itself, reflecting on itself. And that is new. This is not just for the process of developing a new “biology of beings,” or a new science, but simply to know what it means to be human. And this is a deep revelation, that could be philosophical. It could almost be borderline spiritual. To the extent that we develop a process, a lifestyle or a method of science where we see this as a concrete reality. We are evolution, the activity of evolution, looking at itself. That’s pretty wild, right?
EH: Existential.
CH: Pretty wild.
SA: Want to say something about that? Where that came from?
CH: No! I think we’ve got three more days in our course, right? Next week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And we need to come back to this in some way, shape, or form. This little book was a breakthrough for me. I got somewhere where I hadn’t been before. I gained an orientation to questions I’d been carrying for about thirty years. I got some little openings. I’m making some statements that are new territory.
SA: Well, I love this statement, because it’s really hopeful. When I read that statement, I just feel like, “Yeah, we’re going to overcome our boundaries!” Right? The same way the frog is manifesting, overcoming, dissolving the boundaries of the tadpole. We can overcome and dissolve the boundaries we currently experience as our way of relating to the world. So, that’s really hopeful.
CH: Yes, that’s very true. We can keep going. We can become different.