The flower would be its offering of love to the desert!

"There is a difference," the caterpillar told me, "between a reasonable argument and a proven correlation. A good orator can come up with arguments to support any point of view, and even find statistics to back it up. If you want to be a good orator, you should learn how to do that, too. The only way to find truth is to take those points of view, use them to make predictions, and then compare those predictions with real experimental data -- and you'd better make the predictions before you look at the data, son, or you're not going to learn anything. This is how we find truth. This is the difference between science and opinion."

"Oh yeah?" I said, "Prove it."

The caterpillar sighed, and in rapid succession he turned into a cocoon, then a butterfly, then Zhuangzi.