Been There, Done That by Rachel Feltman

Author:Rachel Feltman [Feltman, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

A SEMINAL DISCOVERY

Now that we know a bit more about how hard it is to even understand conception today, perhaps we can better understand how hard it was for those humans who didn’t have microscopes and the internet at their disposal.

In the 1660s and 1670s, respectively, Jan Swammerdam and Marcello Malpighi produced experimental results that would convince fellow scientists that all living things must exist in teeny-tiny form inside their mother’s eggs. In comparison, existing alternative theories were downright nonsensical. Many naturalists favored spontaneous generation for simpler animals: a pile of dirty socks would beget mice, naturally. Even complex humans were thought to stem from epigenesis, a process whereby male and female fluids just kind of gummed together until something started to solidify. This notion required the intervention of some higher power to turn sex goop into human flesh, because, you know, nobody was talking about stem cells in the 1600s. So even though it was technically sort of right, it was also all sorts of horribly wrong.

Enter preformationism, based very logically on the observation of metamorphosing insects and growing chicken eggs. If tiny, fully formed chicks eventually grew and hatched from eggs, why couldn’t humans do the same? In its heyday, so-called ovism, a subgenre of preformationism, posited that all life had existed at the moment of creation, with future generations tucked inside each ovum, Russian-nesting-doll style.2 What a complex, whimsical, logical, nonsensical, poetical theory for the existence of all things. Preformationism gave humankind a brief moment of believing that we’d all seen the dawn of history, tucked as we were within the gonads of our mother’s mother’s mother’s, etc.

Preformationism was in many ways progressive for its pro-ovum bent. Indeed, a man’s ejaculation was thought to merely trigger some sort of explosive growth of the homunculus, which had been tucked sleeping for generations inside the female egg. Alas, this exultation of the female gamete was not due to some sudden feminist Gaia woo-woo-ing on the part of contemporary scientists, but only because eggs large enough to see without microscopes existed in nature. Sperm had only been detected as a wriggling mass, which left scientists assuming it was a parasitic worm that happened to shoot out along with whatever made semen make life.

Alas, preformationism lived long enough to become yet another misogynist villain. When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first looked down into his microscope and saw microbes wriggling about in the 1670s, he also observed human sperm. And he quickly posited that these animalcules—which, rather adorably, is what he called all microbes—seemed lively enough to have tiny men inside them. He saw “all manner of great and small vessels, so various and so numerous that I misdoubt me not that they be nerves, arteries and veins… And when I saw them, I felt convinced that, in no full-grown body, are there any vessels which may not be found likewise in sound semen.”

First of all, ew.

Leeuwenhoek would later backpedal his whole sperm-is-full-of-veins concept, but preformationism really cracked up from there. While ovists

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