Talk:Omne vivum ex ovo
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Should be on VfD: It's untrue. First, the "ovum" theory of life is not the rebuttal to the theory of spontaneous generation. It is, instead, the belief that all life originates in a single egg (one). The idea is that that each female has a fully formed microscopic being within her eggs, and each of these microscopic beings who are female have submicroscopic eggs within them containing the next generation, etc. The Ovum theory of life was one view of human generation from the Renaissance to the 18th century. The other, which goes back to the Classical era, was the homunculus theory, a spermatazoic model, where the male sperm contained a tiny human that would go and lodge in an egg to incubate. Both of these theories, however, are entirely independent of the argument about spontaneous generation.
Ancients weren't stupid. They knew exactly the connection between mating and breeding, and to think even for a moment that they thought that any higher animal life was spontaneously generated is absurd. The theory of spontaneous generation was fanciful to each generation that believed it, and it was resorted to only when they could not find females or males of a creature or when they could not see any breeding. Thus, they thought that crocodiles, biting flies, and the like, where hatching takes place in the absence of parents and where there is insufficient sexual dimorphism in adults to be apparent, were spontaneous generation candidates.
Finally, genetics is very late, and people rejected spontaneous generation long, long, long before microscopes were sufficiently powerful to track genes. I.e. this whole article is someone's misreporting.
Omne vivum ex ovo is attributed to William_Harvey (1578–1657) and according to Farley (1977; p.12) - "But it was the suggestion of the Ova, stemming from William Harvey, that led eventually to late seventeeth-century pre-existence theories and the necessary denial of spontaneous generation." Omne vivum ex ovo mirrors Rudolf Verchow's formula - Omnis Cellula e Cellula that is an attack on Spontaneous Generation. Spontaneous Generation was not abandoned by experiment or latin phrases but by the realisation the even the simplest life forms are astoundingly complex - Diamond Dave 26/01/2006 18.00
Farley, J., 1977. The spontaneous generation controversy from Descartes to Oparin. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN: 0-8018-1902-4
[edit] Duplicate?
Isn't this article redundant given that we have biogenesis? Aragorn2 16:04, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
