(This article is based on Edward Dornick's book Seeds of Life)
The man who was carefully breaking the eggshell was named Aristotle, and today he is known as the most famous philosopher of ancient Greece. However, in the fourth century BC in which he lived, the concept of the word "philosophy" was not merely a mental activity. To become a philosopher is not only to rely on the few pounds of gray matter in the cranial cavity, but also on a pair of dexterous hands to put his ideas into practice.
Medieval alchemists used the egg as a symbol of cosmic truth, and opening the egg symbolized the attainment of truth.
Aristotle's purpose in breaking the egg was to practice an ancient medical experiment. This experiment is recorded in a collection of essays written by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. In one of the articles, "On the Nature of Babies," a method of studying human embryonic growth was proposed by comparing them with chicken embryos. The article clearly states:
"Hatched by two or three hens with more than twenty eggs, and from the second day of hatching, an egg is dissected every day, and you will find that everything will be the same as I said. In this generalization, the development process of poultry can be compared to the development process of human babies. ”
Aristotle's experiments were done rather carefully, and his record was no less than that of today's professional biologists, who found that "in the case of ordinary chickens, after three days and three nights, the first embryonic signs were revealed... At this time, the yolk rises to the tip of the egg, the basic components of the egg are fixed, hatched, and the heart initially appears like a blood spot in the protein. This blood spot is alive and beating non-stop. ”
Through observation, Aristotle discovered much of the common sense necessary for embryology today. For example, when he discovered that "the life element of the chicken is in the protein, and the nutrients are taken up from the yolk through the umbilical cord", he distinguished three layers of embryonic membranes.
Aristotle's positivist spirit and keen observation are amazing, and he seems only one step away from revealing the question of where man came from. He only needs to find evidence of sperm-egg binding. But miraculously, this experiment, which was so ingenious that later generations admired him, did not push him to the truth, and the great philosopher turned the path and proposed that semen and menstrual blood combined to form embryos. According to Aristotle, the role of blood in the human body is crucial. Semen and menstrual blood are both bloody and play a key role in embryonic conception. An important piece of evidence that menstrual blood works is that once a woman becomes pregnant, menstruation disappears. Then menstruation must be darkly knotted with semen.
It has to be said that Aristotle's view was quite cutting-edge at the time, and he at least acknowledged that women played a key role in childbearing. After all, in his time, it was generally believed that only men played a key role in fertility. The semen of men is the seed of life, while the role of women is to provide the seeds with the land to nurture. This is even supported by a creation myth that is considered sacred. As mentioned earlier in the ancient Greek creation myth, the golden egg was separated by Eros, the god of love, from which it was born, and became Uranos, the god of the sky, and Gaia, the goddess of mother earth. Eros used the power of love to make the two intercourse, but the so-called intercourse was not equality, but Uranos sowed the seed of his life into gaia's womb on the earth, and thus gave birth to life.
As mentioned earlier, this myth is naturally copied from the ancient Egyptian version. And this original version also believes that after the golden egg was separated and the world was created, it was the god Ofte who sowed his seeds into the body of the earth god Gaibu and multiplied them. In other words, women are only the soil for men to cultivate in terms of fertility. Aristotle proposed that women are not only soil, but also that the menstrual blood that disappeared during pregnancy is also involved in the shaping of children.
Aristotle's view is certainly more advanced than the previous one that was clearly feminist, but he is only a small step forward. First, he didn't know that menstruation originated from an unfertilized egg. Although he personally broke more than twenty eggs to observe the embryos, he did not realize that there might be an "egg" in the female body.
Second, he was keen on a theory of the so-called "heat of life." Through observations of men and women, especially the experience of hand temperature, he concluded that women have less heat of life than men. Under the guidance of this theory of the heat of life. Women menstruate while men do not because men's exuberant life heat burns away excess blood. He also explained by the way why men have more bald heads, because the heat of life burns off their hair.
It is quite coincidental that this set of absurd strange theories actually coincides with traditional Chinese medicine. Chinese medicine also blames hair loss on eating foods that make people "sexually hot". Fish, pork, rabbit meat, buckwheat, celery, apricots and other foods are classified as "sexual heat", if you drink buckwheat porridge this day, eat celery fried rabbit meat and braised meat, drink fish soup, and eat fruit apricots after dinner, it must be too hot to shave your head.
The heat of life also makes the roles assigned to men and women different in childbearing. The semen provided by men with strong life fever is a fine product after high temperature purification, while the menstrual blood provided by women who lack life fever can only be defective products. Therefore, even if women contribute to the creation of human beings, they can only be relegated to the last place compared to the high-purity life seeds provided by men. As for the two eggs that are now recognized as producing the seeds of male life, Aristotle said that it acts like a pendulum to maintain balance in the body.
Aristotle's absurd mistake in "where did man come from" was lost for centuries by the prestige of authority he looked up to, and until the dawn of modern science in the 17th century, the theory of the heat of life still had a large number of fans. The inferior status of women in fertility is still rampant. The do-gooders even invented a pillow-by-the-pillow manual for conjugal life called Aristotle's Masterpiece.
The inner page of the handbook of conjugal life, Aristotle's Masterpiece, written by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, shows that unnatural intercourse gives birth to monsters.
This "neither Aristotle nor masterpiece" book is popular with the great name of this ancient Greek sage, and Luoyang paper is expensive, and eight editions were issued in England in the 18th century alone. This book can be said to be the complete set of various strange theories at that time. In the name of the sage, he talked about the worship of nature and the destruction of human desires. Claiming that women's reproductive organs are the "base of sexual pleasure", women are lascivious by nature, and in order to satisfy their own unfillable desires, they will seduce men to do things indiscriminately, which will eventually lead to men being weakened by "running out of semen".
The absurd fallacy of a serious book committed by this ancient Greek philosopher is nothing more than a stupid joke today. If there are still people today who claim that women's bodies are the soil sown by men, or that the heat of life makes people bald, it will only lead to ridicule — even junior high school students know "where people come from" . But it is through the mistakes of the sages that human beings are gradually approaching the final truth in a constant process of trial and error. An ordinary person today knows more about the world than the most knowledgeable person four hundred years ago. Just like the egg that Aristotle knocked on, but the shell was too hard, and it took thousands of years to knock it open.
The incomplete timeline below is the process by which humans knock on the egg "Where Did Man Come From?" It just records the smashing of a few eggshells, but it is enough to witness how hard it is to knock it open.
1474
In 1474, in Basel, Switzerland, an old rooster was burned at the stake by a judge. The reason is that as a rooster, it actually laid an egg. The trial of the laying rooster was meticulous, and a defense lawyer was hired for the rooster. The plaintiffs allege that the rooster lays eggs at the behest of a witch hired by Satan the Devil, and that the male eggs are an important ingredient in witchcraft. The defendant's lawyer argued that laying eggs was an involuntary act of the rooster, and that the rooster itself had no evil motive to harm others by laying eggs, so the law could not convict the rooster. But in the end, the rooster that laid the egg was sentenced to be burned alive in public, of course, not as an innocent rooster, but as the devil attached to it.
This trial certainly seems absurd today. But in the eyes of the people at that time, it was an appropriate and reasonable judgment. People at that time did not understand the possibility of sexual characteristic changes, nor did they understand the truth that it was completely impossible to produce offspring when mating between species. The latter point was particularly frightening to the people of the time, who believed that if the male egg were the product of the mating of a rooster and a snake, a demon chicken snake monster would be born that would harm devout believers.
Chicken Basilisk.
According to the Roman naturalist Pliny in the first century AD, the monster had the head, torso, and legs of a rooster, and the snake's letter and snake-like tail had the end of an arrow. Its virulence is so fierce that it can even reach the spear bearer by stabbing its spear. When the snake, the symbol of Satan, mates with this innocent rooster unnaturally, just as the female is the vessel for the male to sow the seeds of life, the rooster becomes the vessel for Satan to sow the evil power. This absurd case can be seen as a microcosm of the absurd medieval view of gender fertility.
1628
In 1628, the English physician William Harvey, while accompanying King Charles I on a hunting expedition, personally dissected a newly mated doe. He had thought that he could find a small, round, gleaming spherical embryo in the deer's womb, but strangely, he found no trace at all, and there was no seed of life, semen, that the male deer had sown in the womb of the doe. But the long-term observation that followed surprised him even more. Although the semen disappears after mating, the doe gives birth to the fawn as scheduled.
Although Harvey did not find any objects of observation from the autopsy of the deer that supported his conclusions, especially the new eggs. But in his 1651 treatise On the Reproduction of Animals, he boldly deduced that all life derives from eggs: "All animals ... No, including humans themselves, are all produced from eggs. This assertion both overturns the fallacy that women are only the soil sown by men, and gives a big fork to Aristotle's theory of semen and menstrual blood.
The cover part of Harvey's On the Reproduction of Animals depicts zeus opening an egg in which various animals, from humans to lizards, crawl out. The egg is written in Latin "ex ovo omnia", which means "all things come from eggs".
Scientists have since followed his instructions, tracing the winding paths to find out where the "egg" that Harvey didn't see but firmly believed existed was. As a ridiculous fallacy, Harvey mistakenly believes that the egg should be in the uterus rather than the ovary. He thought of the follicles in his ovaries as lesions caused by some kind of infection.
In 1672, one of Harvey's fans, de Graf, discovered the true location of the "egg" in The New Treatise on the Female Reproductive Organs, right where Harvey identified it as the site of infection: "There are eggs in the ovaries, and mammalian eggs are fertilized and eventually reach the womb, like birds." Based on the discovery of eggs, Graff protested in public about the unequal status of women: "Nature is equally attentive when it creates women as it is when it creates men". But he made another mistake, he mistakenly thought that mating would inevitably induce ovulation in the ovaries, but in fact, mating had nothing to do with ovulation. And he didn't understand the role of sperm in conception, mistakenly believing that it was just inducing the egg to form an embryo in some way of energy distribution.
1677
One night in the autumn of 1677, Leeuwenhoek, who was in bed with his wife, suddenly had a flash of inspiration when the climax came, jumped out of bed, left his naked wife aside, and rushed to the laboratory with a sample of the bodily fluids he had just discharged. Under the microscope, Leeuwenhoek saw "thousands of sand-grain-sized living miniature animals swimming." These miniature animals "have thin tails five or six times longer than their own bodies" and "advance by the swing of their tails, like snakes or eels swimming in the water." In a letter to the Royal Society, Leeuwenhoek specifically mentioned that the sample he had obtained from this observation was "normal conjugal intercourse" so as not to arouse the resentment of the public, who still believed that masturbation was an evil act.
These miniature animals are called "critters" by Leeuwenhoek, but they are actually sperm cells. Although this is a major discovery, long after Leeuwenhoek's death, sperm cells were considered to be an "animal in semen", and in 1830, the authoritative medical journal The Lancet considered this "small animal" to be a microorganism parasitic in semen, and other scholars believed that the main role of these small animals was to act as a stirring rod to prevent semen from coagulating.
On closer observation, Leeuwenhoek himself triumphantly declared that he had seen nerves and blood vessels in these small animals, and in Christmas 1700 he even declared that the miniature creatures he saw in the semen of the ram "did not resemble a lamb internally, but that as long as the nourishment was obtained in the womb, it could form the shape of a lamb from within for a short time." From this, he proposed that "only male semen is formed into a fetus, and all the contribution of women is to receive semen and provide for it". Leeuwenhoek's discovery underpinned a new school of "spermatic theory", which competed with Graf's "egg source theory" that the egg was the embryonic body, and attacked each other, beginning a two-century-long quarrel.
After Leeuwenhoek discovered sperm, some seminalists claimed to see prototypes of human embryos in sperm.
1726
In October 1726, the shocking news came from the small town of Gudliman in south London that a 24-year-old woman named Mary Toft claimed to be able to give birth to rabbits. According to Toft herself, she gave birth to rabbits because when she was five weeks pregnant, she was hoeing grass in the field and suddenly a rabbit appeared in front of her eyes. She tried to catch it, but without success. Frustrated, Toft was too poor to eat meat, so she could only think of her rabbit feast in her dreams. The haunting dream made her give birth to a rabbit.
Toft became famous for giving birth to rabbits, and his wealth was rolling in, which also aroused the curiosity of many scholars. Her deception was nothing more than stuffing pre-prepared rabbits into the skirt, but it succeeded in misleading scholars into believing that this was a serious scientific topic that deserved to be taken seriously.
Mary Toft, a female con artist who claims to have given birth to a rabbit.
The secret of Toft's success is that this fallacy of thinking what it is like to have a child has been in the market since the ancient world. The idea that the child in the mother's womb will sense what the mother sees and hears and thus affect her appearance is nothing more than a superstitious remnant of anthropology's so-called sympathetic witchcraft. But this superstition exists all over the world, and its vitality cannot be underestimated today. For example, in China today, there are still many people who believe that eating rabbit meat during pregnancy will turn a child born into a rabbit-like three-petal mouth, and eating crabs will make the child come out like a crab during childbirth.
1770
Around 1770, the Italian scholar Spalanzani finally dressed the male frog with his own handmade silk shorts with a waxed surface. The male frog is then arranged to drain sperm in the extremely uncomfortable pre-rubber-era contraceptive shorts. Whether it is true to test the claim that sperm conceive an egg through the sperm of the ability to emit. The answer to many trials is, of course, no. And when he put the semen from his shorts on the frog eggs, the eggs developed into frogs. Sparlanzani successfully demonstrated that both semen and eggs are indispensable factors in conception and that contact between the two must be guaranteed. The so-called "essence" theory is purely mythical.
But Sparlanzani still hasn't figured out what the role of semen in conception is. It was not until a century later, in 1875, that a grumpy German scientist, Oskar Hettwig, found the final answer. When he looked at the sea urchin eggs through a microscope, he dropped a drop of sea urchin semen next to the egg. At this moment, he found a tiny sperm pushing up to the outer layer of the egg, and a moment later, the nucleus of this sperm cell appeared inside the egg, swimming continuously, and finally swimming into the nucleus of the egg - where did man come from, the problem that has plagued mankind for thousands of years, finally found the answer in the sea urchin. The eggshell is broken, and this is how man came to the world.
The Seed of Life, by Edward Donik, translated by Xueyi Wang/Bruce Lee, edition: Papertime | Shanghai Education Publishing House, November 2019
Written by | Li yang
Edit | Gong Zhaohua
Proofreading | Zhai Yongjun