The Ovary of Eve
O'Brien, Dennis
THROUGH A MICROSCOPE DARKLY Dennis O'Brien lara Pinto-Correia has writ C ten a book as unusual as her own career. She is not only professor of developmental biology at Universidade...
...In 1951, he accompanied Thurgood Marshall to Mississippi to protest the false arrest and subsequent murder of three black men...
...She ranges about the world's creation myths fi'orr, the pyramids to Polynesia, as she demonstrates our fascinating attempts to find some connection between human meaning and the mysteries of nature...
...Moore recounts stories about his life among the very rich, the very, poor, and the very powerful with an amazing lack Commonweal 2 2 March 13, 1998...
...But Pinto-Correia's book is epic at a much deeper and even more traditional level...
...if God had incapsulated all generations from the beginning, what was the point of such aberrations...
...The hero eventually wins...
...Paul Moore, the retired Episcopal bishop of New York, takes that thought a bit further--some say too far-in the epilogue of his appealing autobiography...
...Prefonnation was a wonderful prop for the stability of social class, kings produce kings, commoners replicate from generation to generation...
...In the final chapter, "The Fat Lady Will Not Sing," Pinto-Correia notes the preformationist aura of The Bell Curve (published 1994) which argues that "our mental limits are established at fertilization...
...One can sense the theological import from difficult issues faced by spermists and ovists respectively...
...Folk and some learned lore had it that women were produced when sperm of the left testicle was involved in gestation...
...men were produced by the right...
...And then there was the great model of Newton: if the universe extends outward into a sea of infinite space and time, perhaps the world extends downward toward infinities...
...If there really was a pre-formed human in each sperm, what was the spiritual fate of all the sperm-persons who never connected with an ovum...
...Gestation and birth were just a matter of these minute creatures growing to proper size...
...The dominant literary form for stories in science is melodrama: the brilliant discoverer (GalIileo, Darwin, Freud) is reviled by the conservative establishment, wages a valiant battle for truth, and is finally vindicated...
...Epigenesis had a difficult problem with the obvious persistence of species...
...At the partially demolished headquarters of voters' rights activists, he conducted Mass with an ironing board as the altar...
...Ovists, on the other hand, suffered from what Pinto-Correia labels "the curse of the left testicle...
...Other critics complain that his emphasis on social and political action has helped turn many away from the Episcopal church...
...Why would God chose to bundle the human race into the lesser, sinister/emale...
...As in Homer and Dante, the book involves a revelatory trip to the underworld...
...On the question of life after death, he used to say it was foolish to worry about the furniture in heaven or the temperature in hell...
...Like FDR, he's also been called a traitor to his class...
...Epigenesis seemed to claim that organisms began in an homogeneous state and that the embryo was molded into form solely from external stimuli...
...All of a sudden the world was filled with all sorts of miniscule creatures whose existence had never been suspected...
...Epigenesis suggests that everyone starts homogenous, equal--an embryology for democracy...
...Moore, known as a compelling preacher, doesn't claim to be a theologian...
...It is the "underworld" which dominates preformationist theory...
...lacking an explanation for regularized form, the theory ran counter to scientific rafionalism's demand for an explanation for species re-production...
...In one sense this account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century reproductive biology must be without heroes because both sides were dead wrong-or so it seems...
...Perhaps it is her novelist's bent that has produced such an extraordinary work in the history of science...
...Scientific rationalism wanted a mechanism, not an invisible force, hence the theory of pre-formation...
...She is not only professor of developmental biology at Universidade Lusofona in Lisbon, Portugal, she is the author of several books of poetry and six novels...
...After all, he'll never know the difference...
...Some sixty years after he first felt God's undeniable presence while making his first confession at seventeen, he is still almost boyishly in love with what he calls "the mystery of being" and thrilled by the adventure, a word he uses again and again, of putting the gospel into practice...
...I have seen this thing with my own eyes...
...The spermist camp had insuperable theological problems, however, because of the profusion of sperm...
...The "underworld" of seventeenthcentury biology was the world of the minute revealed for the first time by the microscope...
...Continuing with the epic muse, PintoCorreia includes as vital actors in her story all manner of wonders: dwarfs, monsters, and the gods...
...Pinto-Correia tells the tale of earlier embryology as epic: no heroes, no villains...
...And if there's nothing awaiting him but eternal sleep, he's not terribly worried about that, either...
...it seemed the rational alternative to its only basic rival: epigenesis...
...Preformationism was not, however, merely a rash extension of microscopy...
...Refreshingly frank about his own sins and shortcomings, Moore says he'll take his chances on God's mercy if there's such a thing as Judgment Day...
...But Moore seems never to have had any doubt that politics, inasmuch as it can save or ruin lives, is God's business...
...Moore theorizes that if heaven and hell exist, they are the same place...
...He marched for civil rights with Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 and was tear gassed during a peace march in Saigon in 1970...
...Primack Pauline Rudd Norbert Samuelson George Sudarshan Charles Townes TO REGISTER CALL 800-378-6857 OR VISIT OUR WEBSITE AT www.SSQ.net CONFERENCE blADE POSSIBLE BY A GRANT FRON THF JOHN TEbtPLEFON FOUNDATION The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences lus, the tiny pre-formed little person crouched in a sperm cell which Nicholas Hartsoecker depicted in an infamous drawing of 1694...
...Given the assumption of preformation, the major dispute was whether the animalcules were lodged in the egg or the sperm...
...She concludes: "Nobody said that reproduction was an easy matter during the Scientific Revolution, but the subject has not become any easier today....'" ~ Dennis O'Brien's most recer, t book is All the Essential Half-Truths about Higher Education (University of Chicago Press...
...Monsters (deformed progeny) in turn were a great problem for all the preformationists...
...ttomunculus was not the term used by these earlier researchers, rather it appears to be a term of opprobrium foisted upon them by self-assured twentieth-century historians...
...Finally, since all these early scientists were determined Christians---the greatest of them, and PintoCorreia's only possible hero, was the priest Spallanzani--there was continual and powerful interplay between theology and biological theory...
...The sheer presence of God, he explains, would be heaven or hell, depending on the sins of the beholder...
...Under the general preformationist assumption, various savants championed either the ovum or the sperm as the locus of the prior form...
...Caspar Wolff (1734-94) who is generally credited with the definitive refutation of preformationism because of his careful description of the development of organs in chick embryos, nevertheless "to sustain this theory of creation de novo.., postulated that the embD'o was created by an invisible force, the vis essentialis...
...The discovery of sperm itself was fantastic--so many thousands of "worms" lashing about that even today with highly sophisticated instruments it is extremely difficult to obtain a very exact count...
...The left is feminine ( sinister, Lat...
...With his vast wealth, intellectual vigor, and lifelong dedication to empowering the poor, he's been compared to Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
...then the microscope, now the computer with our present temptation to reconstruct human thinking as computation...
...One can learn the lesson that instrumentation not only reveals, it also misleads...
...Ovists and spermists contended for the honor, an honor which, of course, belongs to neither the ovary of Eve nor the sperm of Adam...
...There are many reasons for reading this work: a delight in the curiosa which abound in this early science: Jablot's drawing of a microrganism with a mustache, Dalenpantius's little-man-in-the semen who is wearing a hat...
...Finally, one should not think that the basic issues have been put to rest...
...BISHOP WITH TRUST FUND Bethe Dufresne n Episcopal bishop who is a family friend always had a funny quip to allay my fears when l was growing up...
...The embryology of the seventeenth and eighteenth century offers a compelling case study of the intersection of so-called "pure science" with everything from theology to politics...
...Anne Foerst Hitch Marcus Brian Cantwell Smith Plehdi Golshani Ayub Omma/a Char Davies Bruno Guiderdoni Arthur Peacocke Cyril Domb iV]artinez Hewlett John Polkinghorne Lindon Eaves Kevin Kell 7 Joe...
...Pinto-Correia is by no means confined merely to Christian overlay...
...Born in 1919, Moore grew up in palatial mansions in Morristown, New Jersey, and Pahn Beach, Florida, and received a gentleman's education at Saint Paul's School and Yale...
...Nothing could be more "dwarfish" than the homuncuCommonweal 2 0 March 13, 1998 Exp or ng the science and re at onship between religious tradit ons JUNE 7-10,1998 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY WHEELER AUDITORIUM T hrough a series of presentations and panel discussions, recognized theologians and eminent scientists will discuss such ke 7 monotheistic assumptions as: _9 & transcendent deit 7 who is also present within the created universe _9 The sense off purpose and destin 7 for the universe _9 The distinctweness o f the human being DISTINGUISHED SPEAKERS PARTICIPATING IN THIS CONFERENCE Zaki Badawi George Ellis Kenneth Kendler john Barrow Carl Feit Andrei Linde JocelTn BelI-Burnel...
...Strange as it may sound, the dominant theory to explain biological reproduction was "preformationism': all the generations since Eve were nested inside one another like so many Russian dolls...
Vol. 125 • March 1998 • No. 5
