I stumbled upon an outdated theory on the nature of embryonic development (of humans and all living things alike) while reading the other day that quipped my interest.
(I will cite the books my information is derived from when I can, but to be honest, I read a lot, so sometimes it's hard for me to remember what information came from what book.)
But anyway, at the time of it's conception (ha! no pun intended) this theory really wasn't as ridiculous sounding as it seems today. At the time pretty much everyone believed in God (in Europe anyway) and scientists didn't have microscopes powerful enough to unveil the inner workings of eggs and sperm or the development of new life as it occured, and so there were all kinds of ideas about how animal forms develop.
The theory was coined "preformationism" and I will attempt, briefly to describe it to you . It holds that from the initial formation of the animal (at the time assumed to have been created by God) EVERY subsequent animal and generation already exists within that original animal.
The first parent has, within it's body, a perfectly formed miniature of itself waiting to be born, and that offspring likewise has within it's little body an even more tiny perfectly formed body of a third generation poised to be born after it's parent has grown to maturity. In theory, this pre-formation continues and one finds ever smaller complete animals waiting one within another for their turn to be born sometime in the future. Many authors liken them to Russian nesting dolls, and that's as good an analogy as any.
This idea was formulated before Mendel and his experiments with peas that demonstrated you need genes from both a male and a female to produce offspring. (In the above theory, all young would be descended only from their mothers.)
So why bother writing about such an obscure and outdated theory? Because it is interesting to me. It's a crazy idea, but a fascinating one as well. It was written from the Christian presumption that God created each original animal and plant, but I find the idea much more intriguing through an evolutionary perspective. Can you imagine if it were true? Every living thing that has and that will ever live would have been present in the womb of the first biological organism that suddenly found itself alive 3.5 billion years ago. There would be no missing links, but a perfectly preserved chain of life and form extending from you and I back to the dawn of life. We would have existed then in the tide pools of early life as infinitesimally small versions of ourselves. Wow....cool.
I feel like I should point out that what I have just described would never work. The theory of preformation is so full of holes you could rinse spaghetti with it but that wasn't my point in writing about the it. I am not trying to present it as a valid or scientific concept, but rather as the inspiration for a daydream, and my brief philosophical journey into the "what-if?" I suppose I should also note that there are many insect species that don't in fact need the genes from males in order to procreate....but that is a topic for another day.
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