The seeds of life quest1/2/2023 They wandered in a daze, stymied by observations they could not fit into any pattern. They concocted elaborate scenarios that collapsed in fantasy. They raced at top speed down long, dark alleys chasing suspects who turned out to have airtight alibis. The scientists who finally solved the case ventured off course for decades at a time. The story of sex and babies was nothing like that steady advance toward a goal. In textbook accounts of science, far-seeing researchers systematically gather facts and pile them in sturdy and imposing towers. But the truth is so far-fetched – a bit of huffing and puffing months ago produced a howling, six-pound human being today?! - that it is a wonder that anyone believes it. Every fourth grader knows where babies come from. We’ve heard the explanation so often that we take it to be common sense. We tend to forget how astonishing the story of life truly is. Part of the reason for the perplexity was straightforward. For millennia, the deepest of thinkers (and every ordinary person) had pondered this cosmic riddle. Every person who has ever lived has asked where babies come from. But not everyone has wondered why the stars shine or why the Earth spins. The world is festooned with mystery and miracle. Where do we come from? How does life begin? These were the most urgent of all scientific questions. They did not know why babies resemble their parents, and sometimes one parent more than the other. They did not know, though they assumed, that a baby has only one father, as it has only one mother. (Too much semen? Two bouts of sex in quick succession? Sex with two different men?) They did not know if conception is more likely on the night of a full moon or a new moon or if timing makes any difference at all. (At the time of the founding fathers, no one understood what fatherhood meant.) For centuries, scientists struggled to find out if the woman merely provides a fertile field for the man’s seed, or if she produces some kind of seed of her own. Author providedīut, until late in the 1800s, everything to do with conception and development was wrapped in darkness. In the 1700s, scientists thought that each sperm cell might contain a tiny passenger. They uncovered the mathematics at the heart of music and discovered the laws of perspective, so that an artist armed only with a paintbrush could pin reality to his canvas. They calculated the weight of the Earth, traced the paths of comets that cut the sky only once in a lifetime, and divined the secret of the Milky Way. In the 1600s and 1700s, scientists racked up one triumph after another. Again and again, that confidence would pay off. They raced off full of confidence, for this was the great age of science. Starting with Leonardo, in around 1500, scientists set out to solve this greatest of all mysteries. (The leading theory was that they were parasites, perhaps related to the newly discovered mini-creatures that swam in drops of pond water. They did not know that women produce eggs, and when they finally discovered sperm cells, they did not know that those wriggly tadpoles had anything to do with babies and pregnancy. This makes the garden available for use.They knew, that is, that men and women have sex and as a result, sometimes, babies, but they did not know how those babies are created.
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