Tiger or Tea

At some point in the late 1600s, John Locke went for a walk in St. James’s Park in London and saw a bird that should not have existed.

It was about four feet tall. It had no wings, or nothing you would call wings, just a few stiff quills where wings should be. Its body was covered in something that was not quite feathers and not quite hair. It had thick legs, three-toed feet, and no tail at all. Locke was one of the sharpest minds in England, a doctor and a philosopher, and he had never seen anything like it. So he did what a careful man does with a thing he cannot name. He wrote it down, piece by piece:

“a sort of birds I lately saw in St. James’s Park, about three or four feet high, with a covering of something between feathers and hair, of a dark brown colour, without wings, but in the place thereof two or three little branches coming down like sprigs of Spanish broom, long great legs, with feet only of three claws, and without a tail.”

Then somebody told him its name. It was a cassowary, a bird from New Guinea and the islands around it, shipped halfway around the world to be stared at by Londoners.

What Locke did next is the reason we are talking about him. He noticed that learning the name had taught him nothing. Before, he had a list of features. After, he had the same list of features plus a word to stand for the list. “By that word,” he wrote in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), “which is now become a specific name, I know no more of the real essence or constitution of that sort of animals than I did before.”

Locke believed that behind the feathers-that-were-hair and the three-toed feet, inside the bird somewhere, there was a hidden something that made it a cassowary. And he believed, with a kind of calm gloom, that no human being would ever get to see it.

He turned out to be wrong about that, in a way he never would have guessed.

What Is a Thing, Really?

Start with what almost everybody believes, because you probably believe it too, and it is a good belief.

Things have natures. A tiger is not just a big striped cat-shaped object that happens to be called “tiger.” There is something about it, something inside it, that makes it a tiger. The stripes and the roar and the orange fur are what you see, but they are not what it is. They are the outside. They are clues. What a tiger really is lies underneath, in its makeup, and all the outside stuff flows from that.

Children believe this before anyone teaches them. In a famous set of studies in the 1980s, the psychologist Frank Keil told kids a story about a raccoon. Doctors dye its fur black, paint a white stripe down its back, and sew in a sac of smelly liquid. Now it looks like a skunk and smells like a skunk. Is it a skunk? Young children often say yes. But by the later grades of elementary school, almost every kid says no. It is still a raccoon. It just looks like a skunk. The kids cannot tell you what the “real raccoon part” is. They just know it is in there, and that paint does not reach it.

That instinct is very old. The ancient philosophers had a whole vocabulary for it. Aristotle called the inner nature of a thing its essence, “what it is to be” that thing, and he thought the whole job of a definition was to capture it. A good definition does not just tell you what a word means. It tells you what the thing is. Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 1200s, laid out how we get there. We start from the outside and work in:

“From external appearances we come to the knowledge of the essence of things. And because we name a thing in accordance with our knowledge of it… so from external properties names are often imposed to signify essences.”

In plain words: we name things by what we can see, but the name is aimed at what we cannot see. The name “gold” was given because of yellowness and weight. But it is supposed to point at whatever it is inside gold that makes the yellowness and weight happen.

Our senses can only give us the outside. That is the other half of this picture, and it is just as old. You never see “gold.” You see a yellow shine. You feel a heaviness in your palm. Your eyes report colors and your hands report weights, and it is your mind that puts them together and says gold. The qualities come in through the senses. The thing itself, the substance, is something the mind works out from them.

So here is the picture, and it is a strong one. Every kind of thing has a hidden inner nature. The surface features are signs of it. Names first get attached to the signs, because that is all we have. Then, over time, as we learn more, we dig down from the signs toward the nature. That digging is what science is for.

Locke gave this picture a pair of names that we still use. The nominal essence of gold is the bundle of features we use to decide what gets called gold: yellow, heavy, soft enough to hammer, melts in fire without burning up. The real essence is the hidden inner structure that causes all those features. He put it with his hand in front of his face:

“But it is far otherwise concerning that parcel of matter which makes the ring on my finger; wherein these two essences are apparently different. For, it is the real constitution of its insensible parts, on which depend all those properties of colour, weight, fusibility, fixedness, &c., which are to be found in it; which constitution we know not.”

He had a lovely image for the gap between the two. Imagine the great astronomical clock in the cathedral at Strasbourg, famous across Europe. A farmer stands in the square and watches the hands move and hears the bells strike. The clockmaker knows every gear and spring inside the case. The farmer’s idea of the clock and the clockmaker’s idea are about the same object, but they are worlds apart. We, Locke said, are the farmer. Every one of us, standing in front of gold, or a horse, or a cassowary.

Locke was the pessimist here. He thought we would stay the farmer forever. But the picture itself is not pessimistic at all. It says the case has a back, and the back can be opened. And if you are like most people today, you think it has been. You think science went ahead and opened the case, and found the gears. Gold is atomic number 79. Water is H₂O. A tiger is its DNA. The hidden essences were real, they were there all along, and we found them. Locke underestimated us.

That belief is mostly right. It is also about to split in half.

Opening the Case

Science did open the back of the clock. It opened two clocks, in fact, and looked inside both. What it found was not the same.

When chemists opened gold, they found exactly what the old picture promised: one small hidden fact inside every piece of gold, which explains everything gold does. The real essence was there, and it was even smaller and neater than Locke had guessed.

When biologists opened the tiger, they found something the old picture never imagined. There was no single hidden fact inside every tiger that makes it a tiger. There was no inner gear that all tigers share and nothing else has. What makes a tiger a tiger turned out not to be inside it at all. It is behind it, in time. A tiger is a tiger because of who its parents were, and their parents, back along an unbroken line of births. Its “essence,” if you want to keep the word, is not a structure. It is a family tree.

That is the claim of this essay, and it needs one fence around it right away. Not everyone agrees with how far to push it. A few philosophers of biology, notably Michael Devitt in 2008, have argued that species do have some inner essence after all, perhaps a cluster of genes. Others, like Samir Okasha, say species do have essences, but those essences are relational: the essence of being a tiger is standing in a certain place on the tree of descent. That second view is not really a rescue of the old picture. It is the new picture wearing the old word. Richard Boyd’s popular idea of kinds as clusters of traits held together by natural processes also builds the history in: part of what holds a species’ traits together is that its members keep breeding with each other. Biologists themselves argue over how to draw species lines, by interbreeding, by branching points, by ecology, but the biologist Kevin de Queiroz has pointed out that nearly every one of those rival definitions agrees on one thing: a species is a lineage, a line of descent. The old picture said the essence was in the thing, like gears in a case. On almost every serious account biologists work with today, what makes a tiger a tiger is not in the tiger.

So the answer to “did science find the real essences?” is: yes, for stuff, and no, for living kinds. And it gets stranger, because the case where the old philosophers were surest of essences is exactly the case where they failed, and the case they gave up on as hopeless is exactly where they won.

To see why, we have to start where Locke started: at the wall.

Locke’s Wall

Locke did not just shrug and say “we’ll never know.” He built an argument for it, and it was a good one.

Our knowledge of things like gold, he said, comes only through our senses. The senses give us qualities: yellow, heavy, cold. But the real essence of gold, whatever it is, lives at the level of the tiny parts of matter, too small to see. And there is no path from one to the other. If you looked at gold with eyes a thousand times sharper, he said, you would not see the real gold. You would see something else entirely:

“Had we senses acute enough to discern the minute particles of bodies, and the real constitution on which their sensible qualities depend, I doubt not but they would produce quite different ideas in us: and that which is now the yellow colour of gold, would then disappear, and instead of it we should see an admirable texture of parts, of a certain size and figure.”

That is a very modern thought. He is saying the yellow is not in the gold the way it seems to be. The yellow is what happens when a certain arrangement of tiny parts meets a human eye. Zoom in far enough and the yellow goes away and the arrangement shows up instead. He had already guessed that color is a surface effect of structure. What he did not believe is that anyone would ever see the structure.

So he concluded that nominal essences are all we will ever have. We will always define gold by a list of features we have noticed. And since different people notice different features, everyone’s list will be a bit different. A child’s idea of gold is just “shiny and yellow.” A goldsmith adds weight and softness. A chemist adds that it dissolves in aqua regia, a brutal mix of acids. Who is right? Locke’s answer is that nobody is, exactly, because the list is ours, not nature’s. He went so far as to say that the study of nature “is not capable of being made a science,” at least not a science in the strict sense, with necessary truths like geometry has. Chemistry would always be a matter of trying things and seeing what happened.

Immanuel Kant, a century later, agreed. In the Critique of Pure Reason he said words like “gold” and “water” cannot be truly defined at all. They can only be explained, and the explanation is always open:

“An empirical conception cannot be defined, it can only be explained… one person may cogitate in his conception of gold, in addition to its properties of weight, colour, malleability, that of resisting rust, while another person may be ignorant of this quality.”

This is the humble view, and it is easy to like. It sounds like good manners. We should not pretend to know more than we do.

But even inside his gloom, Locke left himself a clue. He noticed that for shapes, like a triangle, the definition and the real essence are the same thing. The definition “a figure with three straight sides” is not a list of surface features. It is the source. Every property of every triangle, all the theorems in the geometry book, follows from those few words. And he wondered, briefly, whether real things might work the same way:

“The essence of a triangle lies in a very little compass, consists in a very few ideas… but the properties that flow from this essence are more than can be easily known or enumerated. So I imagine it is in substances; their real essences lie in a little compass, though the properties flowing from that internal constitution are endless.”

A little compass. Maybe the real essence of gold is tiny: a single simple fact. And maybe everything gold does, all its endless properties, flows out of that one fact the way theorems flow out of the definition of a triangle. If we knew it, he said, “to know the properties of gold, it would be no more necessary that gold should exist, and that we should make experiments upon it, than it is necessary for the knowing the properties of a triangle, that a triangle should exist in any matter.”

He meant that as a dream. It was a prediction.

Francis Bacon, writing a lifetime before Locke, had been more hopeful. People gave up on finding the true forms of things, he said, because they could not see them yet. But “they are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.”

Opening the Gold

In 1913 a young English physicist named Henry Moseley fired electron beams at samples of different metals and measured the X-rays that came off them. Each element gave off X-rays of a particular frequency, and the frequencies climbed in a perfectly regular step from one element to the next. Moseley saw what the steps were counting. They were counting the positive charge in the center of the atom, what we now call the number of protons. Each element had its own whole number. Hydrogen was 1. Iron was 26. Gold was 79.

Moseley was killed two years later by a sniper at Gallipoli, at twenty-seven. But what he found was Locke’s little compass, almost exactly. The real essence of gold is a single number. Every atom with 79 protons in its center is gold, and every atom of gold has 79. Its yellow color, its weight, its softness, its refusal to rust, its dissolving in aqua regia: all of those “endless properties” now flow, through quantum physics, from that one count and the electrons it holds in place. (The yellow, it turns out, is partly an effect of Einstein’s relativity acting on gold’s inner electrons. Locke would have loved that.)

What kind of essence is it? It is not a stuff. It is not a special gold-substance that gold is made of. It is a count, an arrangement. Aristotle would have recognized it. He had praised the old philosopher Empedocles for once getting this right, when he explained what a bone is. Empedocles, Aristotle said in Parts of Animals, did not just “describe its material, and say it is this one element, or those two or three elements,” but “states the ratio of their combination.” That ratio, Aristotle said, is what constitutes “the essence and real nature of things.” A form, not a lump. The essence of gold is a form of exactly that sort: a pattern of charge that any matter anywhere can take on.

And it really is anywhere. In 2017, astronomers watched two dead stars collide in a galaxy 130 million light-years away. In the fireball they saw the glow of freshly made heavy elements, and most of the gold in the universe is now thought to be forged in crashes like that one. Gold made in that explosion, in another galaxy, from matter that never touched ours, is gold in every sense. It has 79 protons, and that is all it takes.

Something else changed when the essence was found. The direction of definition flipped. For Locke, the name “gold” followed the features: whatever is yellow, heavy, and malleable gets called gold. Today, the name follows the number. The international body that governs chemical names defines an element by its proton count, full stop. If you found a metal that looked, weighed, and hammered exactly like gold but had 78 protons, it would not be an odd sort of gold. It would be a different element, and your list of features would be what was wrong.

In the 1970s two American philosophers, Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, made this point famous. Putnam imagined a planet exactly like Earth, where the lakes and rain are filled with a liquid that looks, tastes, and acts exactly like water but is made of some other chemical. Is it water? Putnam said no. Our word “water” was always aimed at the stuff in our lakes, whatever its hidden structure turned out to be, and that structure is H₂O. “Meanings,” he wrote, “just ain’t in the head.” Kripke added that once we discover a thing like this, the discovery holds with full necessity. Gold does not just happen to have 79 protons. Nothing could be gold without them. We learned it by experiment, but what we learned could not have been otherwise.

That is the old picture winning outright. The name was aimed at a hidden essence. The essence existed. Science found it. Locke’s gloom was wrong, and his little compass was right, and the definition of gold is now about as close to a real definition, in Aristotle’s sense, as anything outside of geometry has ever come.

There is fine print. Chemists who study water closely point out that a glass of water is not a neat crowd of H₂O molecules. It is a restless swarm of molecules, broken pieces, and heavier versions, all trading hydrogen atoms constantly. “Water is H₂O” is a very good summary, not a perfect one. But the fine print is about details. For gold, for iron, for oxygen, the old picture held up as well as any philosophical idea has ever held up.

If that were the whole story, this would be a nice essay about how Locke was too gloomy. It is not the whole story, because Kripke and Putnam did not stop at gold and water. They applied the same reasoning to tigers. And when biologists went to open the tiger, the clock was empty.

Opening the Tiger

Here is the uncomfortable fact. The ancient philosophers did not build the theory of essences on gold. They built it on animals.

When Aristotle wanted an example of a thing with a definable nature, he said man, or horse. When the medieval philosophers debated essences, their stock example was “rational animal.” Living kinds were the home turf of the whole idea. A horse gives birth to a horse, every time. Oak trees drop acorns that grow into oaks. What could be more obviously fixed, more obviously the expression of an inner nature, than the way each kind reproduces itself?

Even Aristotle, though, noticed that animals did not sit still for definitions. His teacher Plato had tried to define things by splitting them into pairs, over and over: animals are footed or footless, footed ones are two-footed or four-footed, and so on down. Aristotle said this does not work for real animals, because real animals refuse to fall neatly on one side of the line:

“Suppose for instance we start with the two contradictories, Feathered and Unfeathered; we shall find that the ant, the glow-worm, and some other animals fall under both divisions.”

Some ants have wings and some do not, in the same species. The split tears a natural group in two. So Aristotle proposed that we do something humbler. We should “recognize the natural groups, following the indications afforded by the instincts of mankind, which led them for instance to form the class of Birds and the class of Fishes, each of which groups combines a multitude of differentiae, and is not defined by a single one.” In other words: trust that birds are a real group, even though no single feature defines them. He could not say what held a natural group together. He was sure something did. (Historians of biology like Mary Winsor and Ron Amundson have shown that the popular story of pre-Darwin naturalists as rigid believers in fixed types is exaggerated. Aristotle, in particular, was a far looser and more careful sorter of animals than his reputation suggests. What he lacked was not caution but an explanation.)

Locke pushed harder. He noticed that members of the same kind can differ inside as much as members of different kinds do. “Many of the individuals, called by the same name,” he wrote, “are, in their internal constitution, as different one from another as several of those which are ranked under different specific names.” And then he took on the obvious answer. Someone will say: animals are sorted by birth. A tiger is whatever a tiger gives birth to. Locke thought this was hopeless:

“If the species of animals and plants are to be distinguished only by propagation, must I go to the Indies to see the sire and dam of the one, and the plant from which the seed was gathered that produced the other, to know whether this be a tiger or that tea?”

It is a very funny line, and it is a fair complaint about how we identify things. You cannot check a tiger’s parents in the zoo. But Locke is looking straight at the right answer and turning it away because it is inconvenient. He had a second reason, and it was a better one. Breeding lines blur. Mules come from horses and donkeys. Locke claimed to have seen a creature bred from a cat and a rat, which he surely had not, but his general point stands: families mix at the edges, so a family tree cannot draw the sharp borders a definition is supposed to draw. He was right about the blur. What he did not consider is that the blur might be the truth.

A hundred and seventy years later, Charles Darwin turned around and accepted it. In On the Origin of Species (1859), he argued that the natural groups Aristotle trusted, the birds and the fishes, are held together by exactly one thing, and it is not an inner nature:

“The Natural System is a genealogical arrangement, with the acquired grades of difference, marked by the terms, varieties, species, genera, families, etc.; and we have to discover the lines of descent by the most permanent characters whatever they may be and of however slight vital importance.”

The features we use to sort animals, the feathers and fins and teeth, are not what the sorting is about. They are just evidence, clues to “the lines of descent.” What makes a group a group is that its members share ancestors. Birds are birds because they all descend from one ancestral population, and fish are fish for the same kind of reason. That was the “something” that Aristotle could feel and not name.

What happened next is that biology looked inside living things, as chemistry had looked inside gold, and found no gold-like fact waiting there. There is no gene or trait that an animal must have in order to count as a tiger. Tigers do share many genetic markers, and that is why a lab can tell a tiger from a leopard using a scrap of fur. But those markers were found by first knowing which animals were tigers and then looking for what they happened to share. A tiger cub born with a mutation at one of those markers is still a tiger, because its mother was one. (That lab test, by the way, answers Locke’s complaint. It checks a tiger’s ancestry without anyone going to the Indies.) Nearly every trait and every gene varies somewhat from tiger to tiger, and the edges of species really are blurry, just as Locke feared. Lions and tigers can produce ligers. Some bacteria swap genes across what should be uncrossable lines. That kind of fuzziness is exactly what you would expect of a family, and exactly what you would not expect of a set of gears. And the variation is not a flaw in the species. It is the raw material evolution works with. A species with no variation would be a species that could not change, and every species we know of has changed. The biologist Ernst Mayr called the old habit of looking for a fixed type behind the variety “typological thinking,” and he argued that Darwin replaced it with “population thinking”: the variety is the reality, and the type is an average we make up afterward.

The platypus makes this vivid. When a dried platypus skin reached London in 1799, the zoologist George Shaw was so baffled by the duck’s bill on a furry body that he suspected someone had faked it by sewing parts together. Later, when naturalists learned the thing laid eggs, it broke the definition of a mammal outright. Mammals, by definition, did not lay eggs. So is the platypus a mammal? By the old checklist, it is a monster. By Darwin’s rule, the question has a clear answer. The platypus is a mammal because it sits on the mammal branch of the family tree. Its ancestors split off very early, before the egg-laying habit was lost on the other branch. The checklist was a nominal essence all along. The family tree is the real one.

Here the old etymology comes back to bite. Aquinas explained where the word “nature” itself comes from:

“The word nature comes from nativity. Hence this word was used first of all to signify the begetting of living beings, which is called birth or sprouting forth, the word natura meaning, as it were, nascitura.”

Nascitura: “the thing about to be born.” The word we use for a thing’s inner essence first meant its birth. For a stone or a metal, that was only a metaphor. For a living kind, it turned out to be the literal truth. The nature of a tiger is its nativity. What it is, is where it came from.

Locke, oddly enough, had glimpsed this too, in a different chapter. He warned that we are “quite out of the way, when we think that things contain within themselves the qualities that appear to us in them.” Things, he said, “however absolute and entire they seem in themselves, are but retainers to other parts of nature.” He meant that gold’s color depends on light and air. But he had stumbled onto the deeper point for living things. A tiger is not a sealed case with its essence locked inside. It is a retainer, a member of a household, and its identity comes from the house.

The Alien Tiger

Now we can see why the two cases split, and it is stranger than it first looks.

Go back to the gold in the colliding stars, 130 million light-years away. It was gold because it had 79 protons. It did not matter where it was made, or when, or out of what. Gold can happen anywhere, any time, over and over, from scratch. It is a kind that repeats.

Now imagine the same test for a tiger. Somewhere on a distant planet, by some wild chain of chances, an animal evolves that is identical to a Bengal tiger, cell for cell, gene for gene, stripe for stripe. Is it a tiger?

On the lineage view, no. It is a perfect look-alike, but it is not part of our tigers’ family. It has no ancestors in common with them. It is a tiger the way a perfect copy of your grandmother’s ring is your grandmother’s ring: it is not. Philosophers have a name for this kind of case. Donald Davidson imagined lightning striking a swamp and, by a fluke, assembling a molecule-for-molecule copy of himself, which he called Swampman. Would Swampman be Davidson? Davidson’s own answer was no, and the lineage view of species says the same about the alien tiger. Tigerness is not a recipe you can follow. It is a history you have to belong to.

Two biologists, Michael Ghiselin in 1974 and David Hull in 1976, followed this to its end. If a species is defined by a line of descent, they argued, then a species is not really a kind at all, in the old sense. It is an individual. It is one very large, very spread-out thing, with a beginning in time, a location on the map, and eventually an end. It is more like the Roman Empire, or the Rhine River, or your family, than like “gold.” Individual tigers are not examples of a type. They are parts of a whole, the way you are a part of your family.

This is where the old theory of definition runs into its own rulebook. Aristotle was clear that you cannot define an individual. You can define “man” but not Socrates, “circle” but not this chalk circle on this board. Individuals are made of changeable matter, he said, and they come and go:

“There is neither definition of nor demonstration about sensible individual substances, because they have matter whose nature is such that they are capable both of being and of not being… And so when one of the definition-mongers defines any individual, he must recognize that his definition may always be overthrown; for it is not possible to define such things.”

He even gave the tricky example of the sun, which looks like a kind but is really one thing: “the sun was supposed to be an individual, like Cleon or Socrates.” Any definition you give of the sun, he pointed out, would apply just as well to a second sun if one appeared. So it is not really a definition of the sun. It is a description that happens to fit.

Put these pieces together and you get the twist. Not everyone accepts that species are individuals in the full sense; the philosopher Philip Kitcher, for one, argued that biologists need several ways of carving up life, not just one. But if Ghiselin and Hull are even roughly right, and a large share of philosophers of biology think they are, then the things Aristotle held up as the best examples of definable kinds, man and horse, turn out to be the kind of thing Aristotle himself said could not be defined. “Tiger” behaves less like “gold” and more like “Socrates.” You can describe tigers. You can list their usual features. You can pick them out, and in practice you will almost never go wrong. But there is no formula that states what a tiger is, the way “79 protons” states what gold is, because being a tiger is being part of one particular, ongoing, unrepeatable thing.

There is a second twist hiding inside the first, and it has to do with necessity. Kripke’s great point about gold was that its essence holds necessarily. Nothing could be gold without 79 protons. But the traits of tigers hold only contingently. The stripes, the size, the roar: all of them are products of a particular history that could have gone otherwise. Run the tape of evolution again and there might be no tigers at all, or tigers with spots. The old tradition treated a definition as a statement of what could not be otherwise. For gold, that tradition was vindicated. For tigers, the only thing that cannot be otherwise is the past. A tiger’s essence, such as it is, is a fact about what already happened.

Kinds that repeat have essences. Kinds that happen have histories.

Where does that leave the question Locke agonized over most? His hardest cases were not about gold or cassowaries. They were about us. He spent pages worrying about babies born with unusual bodies, and whether they counted as human, and who was supposed to decide. He thought the only honest answer was that “man” is a word we define, and so the boundary is ours to draw. He noticed, with some disgust, how people in practice sorted “rather by their shape than descent,” and he had already argued that descent could not settle the matter.

The lineage view settles it the other way, and without any theology at all. To be human is to be born of humans. It is not a test of shape, or of reason, or of speech. There is no checklist a person has to pass. There is only the family, and everyone born into it is in it.

Back in the Park

Picture Locke again, in St. James’s Park, looking at the cassowary through the rails. He has written his careful list: the not-quite-feathers, the quill-branches, the three claws. He has been told its name, and he knows the name did not bring him one inch closer to what the bird really is. The real essence is somewhere inside it, he thinks, down among the tiny parts, behind the clock face, where no eye will ever reach.

We now know what a cassowary is. It is a ratite, a member of the old family of flightless birds that also holds the emu, the ostrich, the rhea, and the little kiwi, along with the giant moa of New Zealand and the elephant birds of Madagascar that people hunted to extinction. Their ancestors were birds that could fly, which is why the cassowary still carries those odd quill-stubs where wings used to be. Before that, far enough back, the cassowary’s ancestors were dinosaurs. In the way biologists now sort animals, the cassowary still is one. It even looks the part, with its bony crest and its dagger claw.

None of that is inside the bird in the way Locke imagined. You could have given him the finest microscope ever built and he could have examined every cell, and he would not have found “ratite,” or “dinosaur,” written there. The thing he was sure was hidden in the cassowary was never hidden in it at all. It was hidden behind it, in a line of eggs running back hundreds of millions of years, each one laid by a mother who had hatched from an egg herself.

He was looking for the gears. He was looking at a grandchild.