The Seeds of Life

by Edward Dolnick

  Heredity was an especially perplexing riddle, even in its most rudimentary aspects. No one could explain why horses gave birth to colts, or why dogs had puppies rather than kittens. Look closer, and the mystery only grew deeper. Embryos from different animals looked much like one another and not like much of anything. How did one tiny clump of tissue know to grow into a kitten and another, which looked nearly identical, into a calf? The facts were so familiar—“like gives rise to like” was an ancient observation—that scarcely anyone had ever pondered them. But once such questions were raised, they met only head-scratching and double talk.

  Other questions, just as basic, met equal befuddlement. If babies somehow combined features of their two parents, as experience seemed to demonstrate, how was it that newborns were either boys or girls rather than a combination of the two? And if the two parents each contributed to forming their baby, why weren’t babies born as monsters with two heads and four arms and four legs?

  THESE QUESTIONS WOULD HAVE PROVED DIFFICULT NO MATTER who took them on. But virtually without exception, the scientists wrestling with these mysteries were men. More than that, they were men who took for granted that women were their physical and mental inferiors. Not all of them would have gone as far as Aristotle, who described females as “mutilated males.” But the scientists’ goal was understanding how men and women, together, create babies. To start with the assumption that one of the two participants wasn’t up to much was to ask for trouble.

  Take the vexed matter of eggs. They had always been associated with new life, presumably because everyone had seen tiny birds peck out of their shells. Countless cultures told creation myths about how the first humans had emerged from an egg. Ancient Indians and Chinese and Tibetans and Celts believed that all of heaven and earth, and not merely human beings, had come from a cosmic egg.

  In the seventeenth century, scientists found still another reason to look with special favor on eggs and ovals of all sorts. God the mathematician, they declared, had favored the circle above all other shapes, because it was geometrically perfect. (William Harvey’s confidence in his picture of the blood circulating through the body rested in part on this faith in God’s fondness for circles.)

  In the heavens, God had proclaimed his devotion to circles in a kind of cosmic calligraphy. The simplest and most elegant shape, the embodiment of eternity, a curve without beginning or end—no wonder that the greatest of all geometers had made the Earth and the other planets round, and had sent them spinning around the round sun in immense and sweeping ovals.*

  So it seemed a good bet that eggs would come into the story of life in a central way. Though no one had ever seen a human egg, many early scientists felt sure they would find one someday. But one strange contradiction bewildered them. Eggs were special; women were not. “What was God trying to achieve through this mixed message?” in the words of the historian Clara Pinto-Correia. “Why would he encase us inside the shape of perfection only to lock that shape within imperfect bodies?”

  With so many questions unanswered, all was murk and confusion. “In brief,” wrote a French historian of science in a magisterial overview of the early days of biology, “nothing was certain and nothing was uncontroversial, except what was blindingly apparent.”

  For men of vaunting intellect and ambition, this was maddening. Intent on solving a mystery for the ages, they found themselves in the position of detectives stymied by a killer who mocked their stumbling efforts with taunting notes and brazen challenges. They stood, staring, in front of a wall filled with drawings of suspects and crime-scene photos. Arrows zigged back and forth. Scrawled labels—SUSPECT? BYSTANDER?—marked several images. Here and there an old label had been scratched out and a new, hopeful guess put in its place.

  The detectives stepped back and scanned the puzzle pieces yet again, in hope that they had missed a crucial connection. Somewhere in this welter of evidence and guesses they must have overlooked a clue.

  THREE

  SWALLOWING STONES AND DRINKING DEW

  AROUND THE WORLD, LONG BEFORE SCIENTISTS SET OUT TO explain sex and conception, healers and shamans and ordinary people had come up with their own answers to these universal riddles. For a few minutes, let’s look not only at Europe in the Age of Science but also at other lands and other eras.

  With many of history’s great riddles, China or India or another non-Western culture made huge breakthroughs that Europe only caught up with centuries and centuries later. That was the pattern in astronomy and mathematics and geography. It was not the story of sex and conception.

  When it came to babies, the focus nearly everywhere was on such practical matters as trying to devise potions that led to pregnancy or prevented it.* More theoretical questions—Where does the baby come from, exactly?—had no such urgency. Just as people around the world built homes and lofty palaces long before anyone had devised a theory of gravity, so people courted one another and made love without feeling any need for a full-fledged theory of conception.

  The most pressing question was why some sexual encounters led to pregnancy and others did not. At some point or other, nearly everything was pinpointed as the vital factor behind conception: sunlight, moonlight, rainbows, thunder, lightning, rain, a cobra’s hiss, the aroma of cooked dragon’s heart.

  Countless stories revolved around eating particular foods or, sometimes, choking down things that weren’t food at all. In both China and Italy, eating flowers led to pregnancy. (Italians favored roses; a red rose brought a boy, a white rose a girl.) In China swallowing a stone or a pearl or drinking dew brought babies; in Ireland, drinking saint’s tears; in India, accidentally ingesting crane’s dung.

  Contraceptive techniques showed similar inventiveness. In ancient Rome, one preparation—this one was wrapped up in a bit of deer hide and tied to the body, not swallowed—was made from worms that lived in the head of a particular species of hairy spider. (The advice came from Pliny, whose wisdom was much esteemed. Even so, it does not sound like a recipe to entice the timid, especially since it appeared in a chapter of Pliny’s Natural History that dealt mainly with spider bites.)*

  In Egypt, one recipe for contraceptives called for “feces of crocodile, smashed up with fermented dough.” The recipe, from 1850 BCE, explains that the concoction should be shaped into a pellet and used as a vaginal suppository. Arabic medical texts never mentioned crocodiles but did often recommend contraceptive suppositories made from elephant dung.

  For aphrodisiacs, too, no procedure was too difficult. One Egyptian papyrus now in the British Museum listed the ingredients of a potion sure to win a woman’s love: “Take dandruff from the scalp of a dead man, who was murdered,” the instructions begin. “Add the blood of a tick from a black dog, a drop of blood from the ring finger of your left hand, and your semen.”

  MILLENNIA BEFORE THE EGYPTIANS, OUR EARLIEST FOREBEARS would have made their own guesses at the sex and babies mystery. Expert observers of the natural world, they would have known the subtlest properties of their surroundings: which plants were good to eat, which reeds made the best baskets, which vines could be spliced into rope.

  Many of nature’s features would not have been subtle at all. The sun traveled dependably across the sky; the moon changed from fingernail sliver to gleaming disc; gray skies poured down rain; the night echoed with howls and roars. Among these boldfaced scenes, one stood out. Some young women watched their bellies swell and then, months later, pushed a tiny, flailing newcomer into the world. This was bizarre and paradoxical: How could an event be both common and miraculous?

  Sorting out how such a thing could be and what it had to do with sex (if there was any connection at all) presumably took a long while. Certainly there were clues. We know that no culture can have failed to discover intercourse. The temptation is to picture happy, dazed couples bursting out of the bushes, exuberantly high-fiving, as if they had managed the prehistoric equivalent of putting together a table from IKEA instructions. Someday, it seems, we will un
earth an Inventors Hall of Fame. There homage will be paid to the benefactors of the human race who discovered sex and fire and storytelling.

  But that cannot be right. Humans would always have known about sex, as part of their genetic legacy. Just as babies take their first steps without advice from their parents (“now shift your weight to your forward foot”), humans would have taken to lovemaking as naturally as to laughing or talking. They would have started tallying up clues to the baby riddle early on. Women who did not have sex with men did not have babies, first of all. And the place where the penis entered the mother’s body, months ago, was the very place where babies came out, today! That was circumstantial evidence, not proof, but it would have made a person think.

  So would the mating behavior of animals. But the connection with humans would not have been self-evident, since many animals mate only at a specific season of the year, with pregnancy and then the birth of the new generation following in lockstep. With humans, the pattern of cause-and-effect would have been harder to spot since sex (and therefore birth) can occur at any time whatever.

  Infertility muddied the picture. Even the great many cultures that took for granted that sex played a key role in baby making found themselves thinking that sex could not be the whole story. Perhaps the childless had offended the gods, or eaten the wrong foods, or gone to bed at the wrong time or in the wrong place or in the wrong frame of mind.

  NO COUNTRY HAD A MONOPOLY ON MISGUIDED SEXUAL THEORIES, but the path of misinformation is easiest to trace in Europe. Books offering sexual advice were among the earliest printed offerings, and they flew off the shelves. Perhaps the most popular of all was Aristotle’s Masterpiece, first published in 1684.

  Just as the Holy Roman Empire was, according to Voltaire, neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, so Aristotle’s Masterpiece was neither by Aristotle nor a masterpiece. But it offered advice to those who were “fond of nocturnal Embraces,” and readers grabbed it up. New editions appeared as late as the 1930s. (In Ulysses, James Joyce describes Leopold Bloom flipping through its pages.)

  The Masterpiece tended to the vague (couples should “survey the lovely beauties of each other”) and the mistaken (the man “ought to take care not to withdraw too precipitately from the field of love lest he should, by so doing, let the cold into the womb, which might be of dangerous consequence”). When the text was not coy, it was lurid. Woodcuts showed such “monsters” as a boy covered with fur and twins joined at the shoulder, and the book warned that these were the penalties paid “by the undue coition of a man and his wife, when her monthly flowings are upon her; which being a thing against nature, no wonder that it should produce an unnatural issue.”

  FIGURE 3.1. This hugely popular sex manual, Aristotle’s Masterpiece, appeared in hundreds of editions over the course of 150 years. The cover shows a red-clad scholar, supposedly Aristotle, and a half-naked woman meant to entice the reader.

  Certainly until the 1700s, that tone of authoritative ignorance was the hallmark of all theorizing on sex and pregnancy. In England and continental Europe, for instance, the question of just what was natural and what was not provoked endless debate. Folk wisdom taught that woman-on-top was a sure way to avoid pregnancy. (A popular poem chastised “Subtle Lechers! Knowing that / They cannot so be got with Brat.”) The medical community could not agree on whether this form of lovemaking was a valid anti-pregnancy strategy, or even if it was ethical. One well-regarded French physician warned that any children conceived in this way would likely be “Dwarfs, Cripples, Hunch-backed, Squint eyed, and stupid Blockheads, and by their Imperfections would fully evidence the irregular Life of their Parents.”

  Theologians weighed in, generally on the side of those who were outraged at the depravity all around them. Here truly was an example of women who did not know their place. “When the woman is on top, she acts [rather than ‘accepts’],” one scholar scolded. “Who cannot see how horrified nature is by this aberration?” Another religious writer explained that “the cause of the Flood was that the women, overcome with madness, had misused the men, the latter being underneath and the women on top.”

  ELSEWHERE IN THE WORLD, AND INTO MODERN TIMES, A HANDFUL of cultures seem never to have bought into the idea that babies come from sex, at all. The most famous holdouts were the people of the Trobriand Islands (which are today part of Papua New Guinea). In the early decades of the twentieth century, according to one of the renowned figures in the history of anthropology, the Trobrianders remained “entirely ignorant” of the connection.

  The Trobriand explanation of where babies come from, Bronislaw Malinowski learned, was complex. When men and women die, their soul or spirit, the baloma, travels to an island called Tuma, about ten miles northwest of the Trobrianders’ home islands. (This was a real place, inhabited by living people as well as spirits.) On Tuma the spirits settle down with the balomas of their relatives and go on with their afterlife. They eat, sleep, age, fall in love. Eventually they grow old. Then the baloma goes down to the beach, wriggles out of its ancient skin, and transforms into a tiny embryo. These embryos, which the Trobrianders call “spirit children,” are the key. At some point a young woman bathing in the sea will feel something touch her. “A fish has bitten me,” she may exclaim, but in truth she is now carrying a spirit child.

  In keeping with this theory, the Trobrianders had no notion of paternity. (Their word for “father,” according to Malinowski, translated as “husband of my mother.”) Incredulous and perplexed, Malinowski asked the islanders endless questions. If he named an unmarried woman and asked who was the father of her baby, he met only puzzled stares and the repeated message, “It is a baloma who gave her this child.” In cases when a man returned from an absence of a year or two to find his wife pregnant, Malinowski learned, no one reacted with anger or dismay.

  He changed tack, launching into a simile about planting a seed in the ground and watching it grow. “They were curious, indeed, and asked whether this was ‘the white man’s manner of doing it.’” It was emphatically not their way. Nor did they find anything compelling in Malinowski’s questions about semen. Yes, of course, there was such a thing, but it served the purposes of pleasure and lubrication. Both sexes produced fluid, and the Trobrianders used the same word for both semens.

  Finally, though, Malinowski thought he had made a breakthrough. If a girl had not had sex, the Trobrianders explained, she would not have a baby. Happy at last, Malinowski rattled off more questions. His good cheer vanished. It turned out that sex did have something to do with babies, but only in a limited, mechanical sense. The reason virgins did not conceive was that their vaginas had not been “opened up.” The role of sex was to perform this widening, so that, at some future time when a woman bathed in the sea, a spirit child might enter her. The more sex, the more widening. Now that they had finally managed to convey this information to him, the Trobrianders went on, Malinowski could understand several important aspects of pregnancy. Now did he see why it was that virgins never got pregnant, and why women who rarely had sex rarely did, and why women who often had sex were nearly sure to find themselves pregnant?

  Malinowski shifted ground. What about animals? Trobrianders raised pigs. Did pigs have their own balomas who brought little piglets? The islanders scoffed. The white man with the foolish questions truly was a simpleton. What did animals have to do with anything? To ask questions about how they reproduce would be to speculate on the afterlife of dogs and pigs, and that was a topic that no sensible person would bother with.

  The Trobrianders had questions of their own for Malinowski. Sex was an incredibly common feature of life. How did Malinowski explain “that the very act which a woman performs almost as often as eating or drinking, will, once, twice, or three times in her life, cause her to become pregnant?”*

  For a century, ever since Malinowski met the Trobrianders, anthropologists have fought over accounts like his. The jury is still out. Do these stories truly reflect what people in New Guinea and A
ustralia and elsewhere believe? Could the locals have been pulling the legs of the earnest anthropologists with their notebooks and endless questions? Or were they professing “official” beliefs rather than their own views, as a halfhearted churchgoer in the west might declare that Jesus was born to a virgin? Or perhaps stories about young girls impregnated by fish bites offered a way for cuckolded husbands and unfaithful wives to save face?

  IT MIGHT SEEM PLAUSIBLE THAT SOME CULTURES HAVE NOT caught onto the father’s role in baby making. When the baby arrives, after all, the mother is center stage, and the father may be long gone. More surprisingly, cultures separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years have independently reached the conclusion that mothers have no biological connection with their own children. Some of these cultures exist today.

  This takes some fancy footwork. The customary strategy is to paint the mother as a glory hound. She delivered the baby, true, but she had nothing to do with creating it, which was the real achievement. That was the work of spirits, or gods, or the father. The mother was an incubator with delusions of grandeur.

  FIGURE 3.2. The Sun God creating the universe. The drawing, from about 1000 BCE, is a detail from a papyrus now in the British Museum.

  In ancient Egypt, the creation of new life—indeed, the creation of the entire universe—was emphatically the province of males. Females played a subsidiary role or (in the case of the gods) no role at all. Creation myths told of male gods who, as one historian writes, “gave birth to their spouses, their children, other humans, animals, cities, sanctuaries, shrines, perpetual offerings, earth, and the planets themselves.”