السلام عليكم ورحمه الله وبركاته
اثناء قؤائتي لكتاب the greatest show on earth استوقفتني بعض النقاط صعب علي فهمها
يذكر الكاتب :
The early history of embryology was riven between two opposing doctrines called preformationism and
epigenesis. The distinction between them is not always clearly understood, so I shall spend a little time
explaining these two terms. The preformationists believed that the egg (or sperm, for the preformationists
were subdivided into ‘ovists’ versus ‘spermists’) contained a tiny miniature baby or ‘homunculus’. All
the parts of the baby were intricately in place, correctly disposed to each other, waiting only to be
inflated like a compartmentalized balloon. This raises obvious problems. First, at least in its early naïve
form, it requires what everybody knows to be false: that we inherit only from one parent – the mother for the ovists, the father for the spermists. Second, preformationists of this kind had to face a Russian-dollstyle
infinite regress of homunculi within homunculi – or if not infinite, at least long enough to take us
back to Eve (Adam for the spermists). The only escape from the regress would be to construct the
homunculus afresh in every generation by elaborately scanning the adult body of the previous generation.
This ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’ doesn’t happen – otherwise Jewish boys would be born
without foreskins, and gym-frequenting body-builders (but not their couch-potato twins) would conceive
babies with rippling six-packs, pecs and glutes
ارجوا المساعده من الاخوان
اثناء قؤائتي لكتاب the greatest show on earth استوقفتني بعض النقاط صعب علي فهمها
يذكر الكاتب :
The early history of embryology was riven between two opposing doctrines called preformationism and
epigenesis. The distinction between them is not always clearly understood, so I shall spend a little time
explaining these two terms. The preformationists believed that the egg (or sperm, for the preformationists
were subdivided into ‘ovists’ versus ‘spermists’) contained a tiny miniature baby or ‘homunculus’. All
the parts of the baby were intricately in place, correctly disposed to each other, waiting only to be
inflated like a compartmentalized balloon. This raises obvious problems. First, at least in its early naïve
form, it requires what everybody knows to be false: that we inherit only from one parent – the mother for the ovists, the father for the spermists. Second, preformationists of this kind had to face a Russian-dollstyle
infinite regress of homunculi within homunculi – or if not infinite, at least long enough to take us
back to Eve (Adam for the spermists). The only escape from the regress would be to construct the
homunculus afresh in every generation by elaborately scanning the adult body of the previous generation.
This ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’ doesn’t happen – otherwise Jewish boys would be born
without foreskins, and gym-frequenting body-builders (but not their couch-potato twins) would conceive
babies with rippling six-packs, pecs and glutes
ارجوا المساعده من الاخوان
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