Wow. There are actually people who still believe in spermism, to an even more extreme than Pythagoras?
Actually he was in your husbands balls you just carry the home he needs to grow in
“eggs develop in a female fetus during pregnancy. So while she was in her mother’s womb, she grew fallopian tubes, ovaries, and uterus.”No shit. The point is the actual BABY was in your partners balls. You carry the tools to hold the baby for it to grow and develop but that baby itself was never part of you. It’s home, the egg it grew from yes but what actually creates the baby no women don’t got that power.
In case you were unfamiliar with historical embryology, this was spermism.
As most of the ancient Greek thinkers were, Pythagoras was half scientist and half mystic, and for the longest time his theory on inheritance prevailed. Pythagoras’s theory attempted to explain the mechanisms between the physical similarity, or “likeness,” of parents and their offspring. At the heart of his theory lay his suggestion that hereditary information was carried predominantly in male sperm. This hereditary information was gathered by the sperm circulating throughout the body and absorbing metaphysical information from its environment (arms, legs, heart, etc.). Since this theory focused mainly around the sperm, it became known as spermism. This information-infused unit matured in the womb whose main objective, according to Pythagoras, was to provide nutrients for this raw data to be transformed into a child. The focus around the male as the primary source of hereditary information had far-reaching effects in society, with civilizations viewing women as nothing more than “human incubators,” and men being considered the forebearer of all children.
Spermism was effectively replaced by Aristotle’s view that both male and female carried hereditary information, so he’s only 2500 years behind on his homework. Nobody is arguing that there is a whole flotilla of complete babies swimming in semen, which would make every ejaculation a horrific mass murder of between 10 and 200 million babies. This ignorant guy probably considers himself “pro-life” while picturing every sexual encounter (or masturbation) as a horrific slaughter of “babies”.
Yet there was a future to be had in preformationism with its spermists and ovists no? Relatively recent compared to the Greeks. Well I guess they went too far with the homunculus. All hail epigenesis…oh wait there are epigenetics propagandists now. Scratch that.
In my superficial look into Faust and Frankenstein I encountered an idea that dudebros of the day were looking for ways to supersede womb-carriers. Victor Frankenstein succeeded but quickly regretted that breakthrough. In Faust II there’s a mini-arc where some alchemists succeed in creating a homunculus. No wombs needed. Maybe this:
Goethe, Faust, and Motherless Creations by Wendy Nielsen
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1015&context=english-facpubs
The Faustian homunculus and Frankenstein’s monster kinda foreshadow AI.
Donald Trump’s mother looked like Donald in a bad wig. Imagine hating one sex so much that you’re willing to blind yourself to how clearly genes come from both parents.
That might explain how I resemble my father, but it doesn’t explain how my brother resembles my mother.
SCIENCE ELUDES THEM!
I think the more appropriate analogy is that of seed (original meaning of “sperm”) and land: the uterus (and those secondary parts around it) played the role of soil, so the poor dirt can be blamed for any and all failures of ripening and crop.
The anti-choicers seem to carry this model subconsciously – I’ve never seen any of them cop to it explicitly, but it fits their approach to female autonomy quite well.
Misogyny has very deep roots.
John Watts @#3 — Nor does it explain how I and my brother were always said to resemble our maternal grandfather. Not our father, nor his father.
Robro,
Nor does it explain why our son looks like my father’s head was placed atop my husband’s body.
His wife found it hard to believe that he was from our family until she saw a picture of my Dad.
We have a picture of my husband’s Great Uncle Julian wearing a RAF uniform.
He took his plane to Canada to train, then returned to NY to sign up for WWI, becoming one of the first Americans to fly and fight in that war.
My husband was active duty in the AF when our youngest daughter saw the picture of Julian and thought it was her Daddy in a “funny uniform”. Genetics are much more interesting and complicated than those fools want them to be.
Well that’s why they think every sperm is sacred.
Ancient Greeks: The smartest people to be wrong about everything!
Talk about Big Balls.
@ 3 John Watts
Right? According to this crap, no one ever resembles their mother? Even girls? Which is batshit.
This wasn’t just stuff from ancient Greece, of course. Earlier civilizations used the metaphor of the male supplying the “seed” and the female being the “fertile earth” that grows the seed.
@Silentbob, #12:
There may well have been even earlier, more egalitarian civilisations that did not fall for this patriarchal bollocks — but ended up falling to it, just because civilisations built upon iron-fisted enforcement of an artificial hierarchy tend to wipe out civilisations built upon treating people equally and leaving them alone if they are not hurting anyone (and thus creating a false perception of superiority).
You have to not understand genetics at all in the first place to have this belief, so what’s the difficulty with believing that children could look like their mom based only on the conditions in the womb?