Description: The first thing children ask about sex is typically, "Where do babies come from?" What children don't know is that they are asking once more the most perplexing scientific question of all time, hailed by the ancient Greeks as "the mystery of mysteries". Throughout history, intelligent, well-educated men and women have struggled to understand how we reproduce, and even now the picture is far from complete. In the mid-seventeenth century, a theory of reproduction -- preformation -- sparked an intense debate that continued for over a hundred years. Preformation proposed that miniature creatures waiting to be born existed inside each potential parent much like Russian nesting dolls. It was thought that God placed these beings during Creation and predetermined the precise moment when each would unfold and exist. In The Ovary of Eve, Clara Pinto-Correia traces the fascinating and often amusing history of this much maligned theory, ultimately revealing its critical influence on modern views of conception.

Opinion on preformation was sharply divided. "Ovists" believed that preformed individuals existed in the egg, but "spermists" argued that the locus of perfection before birth had to be the sperm. This controversy ranged beyond the narrow confines of biology. Most scholars were reluctant to allow perfection to women. After all, these debates occurred in a culture that held women responsible for the Fall and Original Sin and that saw women as imperfect or incomplete males. Yet spermism entailed a formidable moral dilemma -- why would God allow millions of preformed individuals to die with each ejaculate? With wit and erudition Pinto-Correia recounts this controversy in all of its wonderfulcomplexity and vividly renders the religious, cultural, and social life of the day.

"The Ovary of Eve" shows that the basic views of the old preformationists still affect such state-of-the-art techniques as cloning, as well as much popular thinking about conception.

"I have wished for some time that some smart person would make better historical sense of the ovists and spermists than older histories had offered. What a joy it was to see Clara Pinto-Correia's book. Her clear and lively style and analytic breadth bring life to the subject". -- Anne Fausto-Sterling, Professor of Medical Science at Brown University and the Author of Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men

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