Galileo didn’t know. Isaac Newton didn’t know. They knew, that is, that men and women have sex and as a result, sometimes, babies, but they did not know how those babies were created.
Today, every 10-year-old knows where babies come from. But for millennia, the deepest thinkers on earth could only guess. That’s progress, but we shouldn’t be too smug.
The ovists endorsed the same hallucinatory picture, except that they placed the endless sequence of nesting dolls inside Eve’s ovaries. In 1694, a scientist named Nicolaas Hartsoeker drew a picture destined for notoriety. It showed a big-headed person inside a sperm cell, hands clutching knees as if he has been told to brace for a crash.
Until 1875, no one in the world knew where babies come from. Ordinary people didn’t know, and neither did the scientists who helped shape the modern world. Leonardo da Vinci didn’t know. Galileo didn’t know. Isaac Newton didn’t know. They knew, that is, that men and women have sex and as a result, sometimes, babies, ...
Studies of the fetus in the womb, by Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1510-13. Public Domain. Especially in anatomy’s early years, before microscopes, sexual riddles were almost beyond reach. Sperm and egg, even if you had known to look for them, were hidden and elusive.
An illustration from the title page of William Harvey's Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium, 1651, showing Jupiter opening creatures from an egg with the words "Ex ovo omnia" ("all from an egg"). Public Domain
There Leeuwenhoek saw “so great a number of living animalcules that sometimes more than a thousand were moving about in an amount of material the size of a grain of sand.”. Thrilled, he dashed off a letter to the Royal Society. He did not say whether Mrs. Leeuwenhoek shared his delight. Anton van Leeuwenhoek.
For a start, she lacks ovaries. As if to make up for that oversight, she has a mysterious tube running from uterus to nipple. That pathway does not exist, except in da Vinci’s imagination, but the idea was that mother’s milk was made from refined, transformed menstrual blood.
God created every living being, and he had done so in one swoop, at the beginning of time. That meant He must have stashed away every person who would ever live, all those destined to be born in the year 100, or in the 1200s, or 1500s, or some century still to come.
They did not know that women produce eggs, and when they finally discovered sperm cells, they did not know that those wriggly tadpoles had anything to do with babies and pregnancy. (The leading theory was that they were parasites, perhaps related to the newly discovered mini-creatures that swam in drops of pond water.