Summarize this: Synthetic Morphology Lets Scientists Create New Life-Forms - Scientific American
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Synthetic Morphology Lets Scientists Create New Life-Forms
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In the collection of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University reside the mummified remains of a very peculiar creature. It has the shrunken head, torso and arms of a monkey, but from the waist down, it is a fish. This bizarre hybrid was bought by NAME_2, founder of the Boston Museum, from the family of a sea captain. NAME_3 leased it in 1842 to the impresario NAME_4. NAME_5. NAME_6 for his popular American Museum in New York City. NAME_6 claimed it was a mermaid found in Fiji.

In fact, such artifacts, typically intended for sale, were made from animal parts by fishermen and artisans in Japan at the time (although some of the mermaid seems to be fashioned from papier-mâché). Mythical hybrid beasts such as mermaids, centaurs and chimeras testify to our enduring fascination with the plasticity of biological form: the idea that natural organisms can mutate or be reconfigured. Both in legends and in fiction, from NAME_7's 1896 novel The Island of Doctor NAME_8 to the 2009 movie Splice, we seem inclined to imagine living organisms as assemblies of parts that can be shuffled and rearranged at will.

But a crude stitching of components will not produce a viable organism. Bodies aren'NAME_5 a collection of arbitrary pieces; a human embryo grows into a being with the standard features of a human body, all the parts worki Please use JSON format in your answer.
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