Polyps and Marvel: a correlation
I learned a thing today:
Apparently when Abraham Trembley discovered the Polyp, he was basically babysitting two boys and making their learning super fun to distract them from their crazy rich parents’ international divorce scandal. But that’s not even the thing! The thing is that when he wrote about it not being a plant or animal (uh-oh, what the church gonna do about souls?) everyone got pissed and was like “nah bruh, bullshit.”
SO HE SENT OUT HUNDREDS OF THEM TO PROFESSORS WITH INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO DO THE EXPERIMENT AND THEN EVERYONE APOLOGIZED!
That’s badass AF! He was just like fine. do it urself.
Anyway, that’s my favourite thing I learned today!
BUT! Let’s keep going, just... follow my brain for a second.
So I learned this while reading Rebecca Stott’s Darwin’s Ghosts at 6am and didn’t have coffee yet, so my brain did the thing.
Anyway, Tremley’s Polyp was a big deal because it made intellectuals question the structural order the church had demanded from nature and the role of religion in science. It is often cited as the beginning of “experimental biology” because of its odd regenerative properties.
Here’s what the hydra polyp looks like, named for its many mouths on one body.
There’s a book that’s a collection of Trembley’s work called:
I’m sorry, read that again... HYDRA AND THE BIRTH OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY?
Hmmmm.... So maybe this:
Isn’t a 6-legged octopus with a skull face, but actually this:
Because MCU’s Hydra formed when Johann Schmidt separated it from the Nazi party’s science experimentation to focus on EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY!
Lol, I mean, maybe it’s just an octopus-skull logo, but I think the polyp is a cooler idea of throwing in actual history. Any maybe an octopus regrows a leg and a polyp regrows a head and they both mean the same thing and the whole idea is regrowth - that it’s seemingly indestructible. So maybe it doesn’t really matter, but I thought it was cool.
