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Book: Not afraid to ask
Book Not afraid to ask Lancet 2006; 368: S60
Generation: The SeventeenthCentury Scientists Who Unraveled the Secrets of Sex, Life, and Growth Matthew Cobb New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Pp 256. £24.95. ISBN 1-59691-036-4. Correspondence to: Prof Roger Cooter [email protected]
S60
Roger Cooter
Before the big bang blew it completely, the ultimate creative act was that “In the Beginning”. And the spontaneous generation of human beings on the seventh day was God’s finest and cleverest “begat”. Thereafter, everything was a copy, and there was little else to know. Moreover, creativity of any sort paled by comparison. Arguably, the greater the belief in the big “C”, the less the aspiration to act creatively—like God. Some might see among contemporary Creationists the proof of this inverse law. But the opposite doesn’t follow: doubt, disbelief, and modern science do not necessarily yield high creativity. Indeed, according to 18th century Romantics, whose thinking on this matter still informs much of our own, true creativity—genius art—is impossible among those who pursue natural philosophy (what we call science) because, by definition, that is bound to method. As Kant insisted, art exists at the furthest possible remove from the inquiring, organising, analytical business of natural philosophy. The handful of 17th century men who contributed significantly to the understanding of how plants and animals generate were not artists (though some were highly accomplished draftsmen). Nor were they the sort to doubt God’s Creation. Revealing the natural world—from the regeneration of hydra, to the location of eggs in women’s fallopian tubes—was all a part of exposing the brilliance of the Creator. More worrying than Biblical authority was the wisdom of the ancients. By the 16th century this rediscovered knowledge, Aristotle’s in particular, was hegemonic among the learned in Europe and was a part of Church orthodoxy. To challenge it was no light matter, as Galileo’s 1633 persecution reminded everyone. William Harvey, whose thinking in the late 1640s moved from the circulation of the blood to generation (publishing Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium in Amsterdam in 1651), was typical of those who found they could not wholly escape the world view of the ancients, while at the same time elaborating the new Baconian experimental philosophy. “Generation” offered plenty of scope for both, since it referred not only to the unknown means by which organisms appeared (spontaneously, egglaying, or live-bearing), but also to the equally dark business of their development after conception. Harvey, challenging Aristotle’s emphasis on seminal fluid, opted for the role of the egg in human generation, though his empirical evidence was entirely wanting. It was another two centuries before these profound matters were reduced to the biology of reproduction, although now thinking outside this box is almost impossible. Even to cohere a narrative of the 17th century unravelling of the secrets of sex, as Matthew Cobb has done, is to impose on them our modern scientised sense of truth-making. Cobb, a lecturer in animal behaviour,
struggles hard not to belittle the mindset of the pioneers of generation. Yet, he also finds it impossible to write in other than positivistic retrospective terms. Repeatedly, his heroes grope “towards something like the right answer” or fail to see the “truth staring them in the face”. The 17th century unravellers—Harvey, Reinier de Graaf, Jan Swammerdan, Nils Stensen, and a few others—were anatomically talented explorers. With great care and devotion, they teased apart delicate tissues to reveal more and more about life’s beginning. But if creativity was involved, it lay less with transcendental qualities in the researchers themselves than in the rich context that prompted the desire to think about penetrating the secrets of sex in the first place. The socalled Dutch Golden Age was an ideal medium, with the coincidence of wealth from global trading, religious tolerance, and exchanges of knowledge. In this milieu, all manner of inquiry could open out including, literally, new ways of looking. The telescope, the camera obscura, and the microscope were all part of it. Those with the circumstances to do so, such as the wealthy draper and local councillor Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, readily took up the tools. Held by his contemporaries to be an irascible bourgeois philosopher, Leeuwenhoek became besotted with what he could find through his single-lens microscope. His discovery in 1677 of flagellating “animalcules” in his own semen was the nearest to an Archemedian bathtub moment that any of Cobb’s characters ever experienced. Although this was a revolutionary finding, re-empowering semenists against Harverian ovists, it was hardly out-of-the-box genius. Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, in 1674 had suggested to Leeuwenhoek that he train his powerful bead of glass on bodily fluids. And Leeuwenhoek’s report of his discovery to Oldenburg reveals to us yet other boxes: the semen was not “obtained by any sinful contrivance on my part”, he confessed, but by “the excess which Nature provided me in my conjugal relations”. Apparently it was “six beats of the pulse” after ejaculating that he abandoned his wife Cornelia for some time with his favourite instrument. The rest might have been history. But it wasn’t. “Correct” genetic understanding of the role of egg and sperm had to wait until the 1850s, and then another century for Crick and Watson. In his final chapter, Cobb gives short shrift to post-17th century developments, and he avoids entirely all mention of a literature since Mary Shelley that reads this history differently, in terms of men’s knowledge and power usurping that of women’s over procreation. Neither Creation nor creativity may have been at issue, but neither was entirely disinterested method. www.thelancet.com Medicine and Creativity Vol 368 December 2006
Generation: The SeventeenthCentury Scientists Who Unraveled the Secrets of Sex, Life, and Growth Matthew Cobb New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Pp 256. £24.95. ISBN 1-59691-036-4. Correspondence to: Prof Roger Cooter [email protected]
S60
Roger Cooter
Before the big bang blew it completely, the ultimate creative act was that “In the Beginning”. And the spontaneous generation of human beings on the seventh day was God’s finest and cleverest “begat”. Thereafter, everything was a copy, and there was little else to know. Moreover, creativity of any sort paled by comparison. Arguably, the greater the belief in the big “C”, the less the aspiration to act creatively—like God. Some might see among contemporary Creationists the proof of this inverse law. But the opposite doesn’t follow: doubt, disbelief, and modern science do not necessarily yield high creativity. Indeed, according to 18th century Romantics, whose thinking on this matter still informs much of our own, true creativity—genius art—is impossible among those who pursue natural philosophy (what we call science) because, by definition, that is bound to method. As Kant insisted, art exists at the furthest possible remove from the inquiring, organising, analytical business of natural philosophy. The handful of 17th century men who contributed significantly to the understanding of how plants and animals generate were not artists (though some were highly accomplished draftsmen). Nor were they the sort to doubt God’s Creation. Revealing the natural world—from the regeneration of hydra, to the location of eggs in women’s fallopian tubes—was all a part of exposing the brilliance of the Creator. More worrying than Biblical authority was the wisdom of the ancients. By the 16th century this rediscovered knowledge, Aristotle’s in particular, was hegemonic among the learned in Europe and was a part of Church orthodoxy. To challenge it was no light matter, as Galileo’s 1633 persecution reminded everyone. William Harvey, whose thinking in the late 1640s moved from the circulation of the blood to generation (publishing Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium in Amsterdam in 1651), was typical of those who found they could not wholly escape the world view of the ancients, while at the same time elaborating the new Baconian experimental philosophy. “Generation” offered plenty of scope for both, since it referred not only to the unknown means by which organisms appeared (spontaneously, egglaying, or live-bearing), but also to the equally dark business of their development after conception. Harvey, challenging Aristotle’s emphasis on seminal fluid, opted for the role of the egg in human generation, though his empirical evidence was entirely wanting. It was another two centuries before these profound matters were reduced to the biology of reproduction, although now thinking outside this box is almost impossible. Even to cohere a narrative of the 17th century unravelling of the secrets of sex, as Matthew Cobb has done, is to impose on them our modern scientised sense of truth-making. Cobb, a lecturer in animal behaviour,
struggles hard not to belittle the mindset of the pioneers of generation. Yet, he also finds it impossible to write in other than positivistic retrospective terms. Repeatedly, his heroes grope “towards something like the right answer” or fail to see the “truth staring them in the face”. The 17th century unravellers—Harvey, Reinier de Graaf, Jan Swammerdan, Nils Stensen, and a few others—were anatomically talented explorers. With great care and devotion, they teased apart delicate tissues to reveal more and more about life’s beginning. But if creativity was involved, it lay less with transcendental qualities in the researchers themselves than in the rich context that prompted the desire to think about penetrating the secrets of sex in the first place. The socalled Dutch Golden Age was an ideal medium, with the coincidence of wealth from global trading, religious tolerance, and exchanges of knowledge. In this milieu, all manner of inquiry could open out including, literally, new ways of looking. The telescope, the camera obscura, and the microscope were all part of it. Those with the circumstances to do so, such as the wealthy draper and local councillor Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, readily took up the tools. Held by his contemporaries to be an irascible bourgeois philosopher, Leeuwenhoek became besotted with what he could find through his single-lens microscope. His discovery in 1677 of flagellating “animalcules” in his own semen was the nearest to an Archemedian bathtub moment that any of Cobb’s characters ever experienced. Although this was a revolutionary finding, re-empowering semenists against Harverian ovists, it was hardly out-of-the-box genius. Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, in 1674 had suggested to Leeuwenhoek that he train his powerful bead of glass on bodily fluids. And Leeuwenhoek’s report of his discovery to Oldenburg reveals to us yet other boxes: the semen was not “obtained by any sinful contrivance on my part”, he confessed, but by “the excess which Nature provided me in my conjugal relations”. Apparently it was “six beats of the pulse” after ejaculating that he abandoned his wife Cornelia for some time with his favourite instrument. The rest might have been history. But it wasn’t. “Correct” genetic understanding of the role of egg and sperm had to wait until the 1850s, and then another century for Crick and Watson. In his final chapter, Cobb gives short shrift to post-17th century developments, and he avoids entirely all mention of a literature since Mary Shelley that reads this history differently, in terms of men’s knowledge and power usurping that of women’s over procreation. Neither Creation nor creativity may have been at issue, but neither was entirely disinterested method. www.thelancet.com Medicine and Creativity Vol 368 December 2006