Seeds of life
Subtitle: from Aristotle to Da Vinci, from shark's teeth to frog's pants, the long and strange quest to discover where babies come from
By: Edward Dolnick
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 309
ISBN-13: 9780465082957
Subjects: Social aspects; Human reproduction; Mythology; History
Description: "Why cracking the code of human conception took centuries of wild theories, misogynist blunders, and ludicrous mistakes. Throughout most of human history, babies were surprises. People knew the basics: men and women had sex, and sometimes babies followed. But beyond that the origins of life were a colossal mystery. The Seeds of Life is the remarkable and rollicking story of how a series of blundering geniuses and brilliant amateurs struggled for two centuries to discover where, exactly, babies come from. Taking a page from investigative thrillers, acclaimed science writer Edward Dolnick looks to these early scientists as if they were detectives hot on the trail of a bedeviling and urgent mystery. These strange searchers included an Italian surgeon using shark teeth to prove that female reproductive organs were not 'failed' male genitalia, and a Catholic priest who designed ingenious miniature pants to prove that frogs required semen to fertilize their eggs. A witty and rousing history of science, The Seeds of Life presents our greatest scientists struggling-against their perceptions, their religious beliefs, and their deep-seated prejudices-to uncover how and where we come from"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-296) and index.
Table of contents: title: Prologue: England in the early 1630s; title: Part one: Peering into the body. Onward to glory ; Hidden in deep night ; Swallowing stones and drinking dew ; Unmoored in time ; "Double, double toil and trouble" ; Door A or door B?; title: Part two: The search for the egg. Missing: one universe (reward to finder) ; Sharks' teeth and cows' eggs ; The egg, at last ; A world in a drop of water ; "Animals of the semen"; title: Part three: Russian dolls. Dolls within dolls ; The message in God's fine print ; Sea of troubles ; The rabbit woman of Godliman ; "All in pieces, all coherence gone" ; The cathedral that built itself ; A vase in silhouette; title: Part four: The clockwork topples and a new theory rises. Frogs in silk pants ; A drop of venom ; The craze of the century ; "I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open" ; The nose of the Sphinx ; "The game is afoot" ; Caught!