The Seeds of Life Read online

  One papyrus manuscript records the boasts of the Sun God, who first created himself out of nothing—we are not told how—and then took matters into his own capable hands, masturbating the universe into existence. “I created on my own every being… my fist became my spouse. I copulated with my hand.”

  A second papyrus depicts a variant of the same legend, in which the Sun God again coaxes the universe into being, albeit in a slightly different manner (see Figure 3.2).

  Again and again, cultures that had nothing in common came up with nearly identical answers to the riddles of sex and babies. Few cultures can have shared as little as the ancient Greeks and today’s African bushmen, for instance, but, as the anthropologist Lorna Marshall writes, “the !Kung believe that in conception the woman’s menstrual blood unites with the man’s semen to form the embryo.” This was precisely Aristotle’s view. (He reasoned that menstrual blood must serve some important function, noted that pregnant women do not menstruate, and leapt to the wrong conclusion.)

  With yet another riddle—What happens in the embryo’s very earliest days?—we find remarkably similar accounts in the Book of Job and in Aristotle. “Didst thou not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese, clothe me with skin and flesh and knit me together with bones and sinews?” asked Job. A century or more later, the same cheese making, curdling imagery turned up in Aristotle. When semen and menstrual blood meet, he wrote in On Generation, the semen “acts in the same way as rennet acts upon milk.”

  People as different as the modern-day Basques of Spain and the Bantu of southern Africa, or the ancient Hindus and Hebrews, all hit on virtually the same explanation of how the red and the white parts of the body come to be. “The father provides the white seed, from which are formed bones and nerves, the nails, brain, and the white of the eyes,” the Talmud declares. “The mother provides the red-seed, from which are formed the skin and the flesh, the hair, and the black of the eyes.” Indian medical writings asserted the same equation—man = white, woman = red—in almost the same words.

  Perhaps the most widespread of these shared beliefs was that the man’s role in sex was to plant a seed and the woman’s role was to nurture it. Seed-and-field imagery dates to ancient times. The Bible is dotted with examples. In Genesis, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son. When Abraham takes a knife to Isaac’s throat, God calls him off and rewards him for his obedience. “I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies.”

  The historian (and embryologist) Joseph Needham found similar accounts in ancient texts in Egypt and India, and in the Talmud. Needham also cited grim evidence of a different sort that points in the same direction. The belief that women are merely the field for the new generation but do not shape it, he wrote, fits with the widespread practice, in warfare, “of putting captured males to death and retaining the females as concubines. On such a theory, no fear would be entertained of corrupting the race with alien blood in this way.”

  Everyday English vocabulary contains a less gory hint that the “seed” theory was widespread: the word “semen” comes from the Latin for “seed.” The picture of seeds and fields persists to this day. Anthropologists in Turkish villages in recent decades gathered many such accounts. “If you plant wheat, you get wheat,” one Turkish woman explained. “If you plant barley, you get barley. It is the seed which determines the kind of plant which will grow, while the field nourishes the plant but does not determine the kind. The man gives the seed, and the woman is like the field.”

  In modern-day Egypt, as well, poor, urban women still downplayed their own role in conception. “Here in Egypt, we say that the woman is just a container,” one woman told the anthropologist Marcia Inhorn. “It is something from God, but she is only a container.” The most common view she encountered, Inhorn writes, is that “men bring life and women receive it.” (Even so, infertility is always the woman’s problem—unless the man cannot have sex at all—because his only task is to ejaculate. He throws; she fumbles.)

  Common across many cultures, too, even today, is a belief that it takes many acts of sex to create a baby. “Many of my New Guinea friends feel obliged to have regular sex right up to the end of pregnancy,” writes the scientist Jared Diamond, “because they believe that repeated infusions of semen furnish the material to build the fetus’s body.”

  A virtually identical theory is common on the other side of the world, among Indian tribes up and down the South American continent. Though they live thousands of miles from one another and do not interact, many of these far-flung tribes hold to the same little-by-little theory. In one anthropologist’s paraphrase, “the fetus is built up gradually, somewhat like a snowball.”

  In the rain forest, evidently, you can be a little bit pregnant. In order for a pregnancy to “take,” the fetus must be regularly doused with fresh semen. So demanding is this task that Yanomami men talk about how they have grown thin from their baby-making labors.

  Many South American tribes go a step further: not only is the developing baby built up from new batches of semen, but it is best if several different men make a contribution. All those men are considered the child’s father. Among the Bari people in Venezuela, for instance, “a good mother will make a point of having sex with several different men, especially when she is pregnant,” one historian writes, “so that her child will enjoy the qualities (and paternal care) not merely of the best hunter, but also of the best storyteller, the strongest warrior, and the most considerate lover.”

  WHEN IT CAME TO SEX, NOT EVERYTHING WAS CONSENSUS. Traditional Jewish and Christian views differed sharply, for instance. Jewish doctrine was far from pro-female (the daily morning prayer of an Orthodox Jewish man includes the words “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe, who has not created me a woman”), but sex was regarded as something for both partners to enjoy and cherish. Husbands had a duty to provide their wives not just with food and clothing but also with sex. The Talmud even spelled out a schedule: men of means should go to bed with their wives every day, laborers twice a week, camel-drivers once a month, sailors once every three months.

  Christian doctrine took a different tack. Sex was suspect. Theologians wrote endlessly on sex and morality, poking their heads into the marital bedroom and occasionally even peeking beneath the sheets. “Shameful kissing and touching” could be condoned, they decreed, so long as the partners hoped to get pregnant and were not indulging for the sake of pleasure. Even within marriage, sex was regarded with suspicion, out of fear that it might divert the participants from spiritual thoughts. “Adulterous is also the man who loves his wife too ardently,” the church decreed.*

  Religious dogma was important, because science and theology in the West were completely intertwined. Galileo had brought the Inquisition down on his head for suggesting that the earth moved around the sun. His trial showed that there were no exclusively scientific questions. What was true for astronomy held for biology, as well: every declaration about the world was also a statement about God, who had made the world.

  In the 1600s and 1700s, virtually all the major scientists in Europe were devout Christians who shared a deep faith that their mission was to discover God’s reasons for designing the world as he had. Questions that seem ludicrous to us—Did Adam have a navel? Were the lions in the Garden of Eden vegetarians? If lust is a sin and there was no sin in Eden before the fall, how did Adam and Eve have sex?—struck them as crucial. Since the world was the work of God and the Bible the word of God, it fell to scientists to bring the same reverent scrutiny to both.

  The deer in King Charles’s royal parks and the birds and beasts in Eden were equally valuable witnesses to the nature of God’s creation, and equally real. To dismiss such mysteries as Adam’s navel would be as scandalous as if modern scientists were to ignore glaring facts—the eruption of a supposedly dormant volcano or the discovery of fossilized bones from an unknown creature—
because they did not know what to make of them.

  So it was seen as vitally important to both science and Christianity that Saint Augustine had explained, for instance, what sex looked like in Eden. Just as our hands and feet move under our command, Augustine wrote, in Eden every organ was a “ready servant of the will.” Lust did not come into it. In the Garden, one modern historian explains, Adam commanded his penis to rise or fall as needed, “rather like a drawbridge.”

  Sex in Eden was a sedate affair, performed with what Augustine called “tranquility of mind.” There was no question of disturbing the neighbors, even if there had been any neighbors to disturb. And in heaven there was no sex at all. Men and women would have their familiar bodies in heaven, theologians taught, but the women’s would have been repurposed. “The female parts, not suited to their old uses, will achieve a new beauty,” Augustine wrote, “and this will not arouse the lust of the beholder (for there will be no lust). Rather, it will inspire praises of the wisdom and goodness of God.”

  Everyone in heaven would be thirty, according to Augustine, the age that marked the peak of bodily perfection. (For those who died younger, God would set the clock forward.) Theologians wrestled with countless similar riddles, endlessly pondering such questions as whether God would restore arms and legs lost in battle or devoured by sharks. The case of cannibalism provoked some of the thorniest debates. Whose body was whose? Augustine concluded that “the eaten flesh will be restored by God to the man in whom it first became human flesh. This flesh can be looked upon as a loan taken by the famished man and, like any other borrowed goods, must be returned to the one from whom it was taken.”

  Those restored and heavenly bodies, though they would not engage in sex, would enjoy a variety of other pleasures. Singing God’s praise ranked near the top. “All our activity will consist in singing ‘Amen’ and ‘Alleluia,’” Augustine declared, and he assured his readers that their delight in this entertainment would last forever.* (This was a bold claim, Augustine acknowledged, since heavenly days “have no end in time.” Forever meant forever.)

  Other Christian sages focused on different heavenly entertainments, including the opportunity to watch sinners in torment. Heaven came with portholes on hell. “In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it,” wrote Saint Thomas Aquinas, “they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned.”

  Schadenfreude has seldom risen to such heights. Isaac Watts, the seventeenth-century theologian who wrote “Joy to the World” and hundreds of other hymns, explored the theme in poetry: “What bliss will fill the ransomed souls / When they in glory dwell, / To see the sinner as he rolls, / In quenchless flames of hell.”

  This was a long way from the Song of Songs: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.”

  FOUR

  UNMOORED IN TIME

  THE FIRST GREAT ADVANCE IN THE SEX AND BABIES MYSTERY came shortly before 1500, when the squeamish but voraciously curious Leonardo da Vinci took knife in hand and turned his attention to anatomy.

  That was new. For two thousand years, to study medicine had been to pore over ancient texts. Medicine was an academic exercise, a debate over exactly what Hippocrates or Galen had decreed long ago. Then, beginning with Leonardo and a few other pioneers, medicine shifted course. The new approach, revolutionary in its daring, was to look with one’s own eyes rather than those of a bygone sage.

  Most often, those searching eyes belonged to anatomists, who boldly took scalpel in hand and sliced their way past muscle and gristle and inside the human body. The very word “autopsy,” a hybrid that combined “to see” and “oneself,” enshrined the new ideal. Though we often read that dissection was taboo in Europe all through the Middle Ages, that is not so. Bodies had been cut open long before the Scientific Revolution. What changed was not the fact of the cutting but the motive for it. The new motive was to learn how this complicated living machine worked.

  From roughly 1300 to 1500, opening the body after death was common, usually for embalming. In the case of saints, the body was often disassembled so that various bits—hearts, hands, fingers, bones, skulls, vials of blood—could be distributed for the veneration of the faithful. Tourists in Siena today can still gaze upon Saint Catherine’s mummified head in an elaborate gold reliquary; her right thumb rests nearby in a smaller shrine. In Padua, a few hours north, the tongue of St. Anthony lies in an ornate shrine of its own.

  The ancient world, in contrast, had largely banned the cutting up of human bodies. For the Greeks and Romans, to slice the body apart was an insult to the dead and perhaps a ruinous mistake as well, if it meant depriving a beloved relative of a body he was going to need in the afterlife. (Cleopatra supposedly ignored the taboo, perhaps because she was dealing with slaves. According to one eminent historian, she gave orders calling for the execution of pregnant slave girls at fixed intervals after conception, so that she could see how infants developed in the womb. And Nero, seldom outdone even in depravity, murdered his mother and then had her body cut open, at least according to legend, because he was curious “to see the place where he was conceived.”)

  Dissection was a revolting business. Even Aristotle, a devoted student of the natural world and a man of almost boundless curiosity, acknowledged the “great disgust” we feel when “we see what composes the human species: blood, flesh, bones, veins, and similar parts.”

  But the ancients had wavered in their views. Over the course of the fourth and third centuries BCE, Greek physicians in Alexandria had carried out hundreds of careful, detailed dissections of human cadavers. That era proved an exception. Neither Hippocrates nor Galen, the two greatest figures in the history of early medicine, ever dissected a human body. (Hippocrates lived around 400 BCE in Greece, and Galen around 150 CE in Rome and elsewhere in the Roman empire.) Both men relied instead on analogies from animal dissections.

  Anatomists in Roman days competed for attention, and Galen loved a spotlight. Part carnival barker and part medical lecturer, he performed dissections before swarms of gawking spectators. He favored pigs and primates, though on one notable occasion he outdid his rivals by dissecting an elephant. For direct observations of human anatomy, Galen had to grab whatever opportunities fortune sent his way. Once he hurried to examine a body that a flood had washed from its grave. The flesh had rotted away, but Galen noted with fascination that the skeleton was still intact.*

  FIGURE 4.1. Nero watches as physicians probe his mother’s body.

  Sometimes he did not have to wait for floods. In what is now Turkey, Galen’s duties included tending to the gladiators who fought for the entertainment of tens of thousands of roaring spectators. Matches ended in death or surrender, with the crowd choosing whether the loser would be spared to fight another day or dispatched with a sword to the throat.

  Gladiators were typically slaves or prisoners of war, but some were free men who had, one historian tells us, “taken an oath agreeing to be burnt, chained, beaten, and killed with an iron weapon.” In return, they had a (slim) chance at fame, glory, and riches. They suffered gaping wounds inflicted by sword and dagger. These provided Galen with tests for his surgical skills. Better yet, he noted contentedly, they offered “windows into the body.”

  The early church insisted that it was sinful to peep through any such window. Humankind’s task was to rise above the body, not to immerse itself in the contemplation of its muck and fluids. “It is far more excellent to know that the flesh will rise again and will live for evermore,” wrote Saint Augustine, around the year 400 CE, “than anything that scientific men have been able to discover in it by careful examination.”

  Since God had hidden the body’s secrets from prying eyes, Augustine argued, it was impious to try to subvert his intentions. The anatomists’ “cruel zeal for science” had led them astray. Curiosity was a sin, not a virtue, and in fact a deadly sin. Augustine railed against it
with fury. To study nature or even the inanimate world, Augustine wrote, was to indulge “the lust of the eyes.” This was perversion. A person might just as well gawk at sideshow freaks or stop at a roadside accident to stare at “a mangled carcass.” We picture scientists as explorers of the unknown; our forebears saw them as peeping Toms.

  Augustine’s denunciation of curiosity prevailed for a thousand years. To ask questions was to flirt with skepticism, and skepticism was but a step from heresy. Who were human beings, creatures made of clay, to question their Creator? Faith was the essential virtue, pride the great danger. “Knowledge puffeth up,” Paul declared in his first letter to the Corinthians, and humankind had a duty to bear that rebuke constantly in mind.

  So ran the standard argument, and for century after century conventional thinkers thumped out indignant variations on the same theme. Insight was best found in books, preferably venerable ones. To look for oneself was a mark not of independence but of foolish impudence, as if a layman proposed that he could build a sturdier ship than a professional. The new scientific credo—think for yourself—threatened to turn the world upside down. “If the wisest men in the world tell them that they see it or know it; if the workers of miracles, Christ and his apostles, tell them that they see it; if God himself tells them that He sees it,” one theologian thundered in 1665, “yet all this does not satisfy them unless they may see it themselves.”

  Today the insistence that we defer to authority sounds strange and wrongheaded. Why take someone else’s word for what we could test ourselves? How can there ever be progress if we constantly look to the past for guidance? But we live in a world shaped by an intellectual revolution. That revolution was a scientific one, and its heroes were not generals but intellectuals. Their victory was so complete that we take it for granted, to the point that we scarcely remember that we’ve built our homes on what was once a battleground.