The Ovary of Eve: Egg and Sperm and Preformation By Clara Pinto-Correia (review)

the tsunami of modern information processing. For whatever reason, it is probably time to abandon this approach and focus on introducing these concepts in clinical epidemiology, biostatistics, and health services research course material. For those individuals with an interest in the fundamental concepts at the root of statistics, biostatistics, and clinical inference, this treatise contains a vast amount of fertile soil to cultivate and nourish those interests. REFERENCES 1.Wulff, H.R. Rational Diagnosis and Treatment. London: Blackwell Scientific, 1976. 2.Sox, H.C; Blatt, M.A.; Higgins, M.C; and Marton, ?.?. MedicalDecision Making. Boston: Butterworth, 1988. 3.Albert, D.A.; Munson, R.; and Resnik, M.D. Reasoning in Medicine. Baltimore , London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988. Daniel Albert University ofPennsylvania The Ovary ofEve: Egg and Sperm and Preformation. By Clara Pinto-Correia . With a forward by Stephen Jay Gould. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Pp. 396. $29.95. The history of preformation is one which has been well-told over the past half century. A number ofmajor studies, including my own Sexuality: An Illustrated History (New York: John Wiley, 1989), had documented the rise (and fall) of the belief that all ofthe adult qualities of the human being were initially present in the sperm. Indeed, it was believed that one could actually see the "preformed" male in the sperm. Beginning with Greco-Roman medicine, this belief of the "passivity" of the female as the bed upon which the human being develops from the fully preformed sperm was an issue of faith. (Alternative views, those of the "ovists," held that all of the qualities of the adult were present in the egg; but this clearly was a minority view.) Many cultural critics of science over the past decade have used the implications of the debates around preformation and its predominance in Renaissance anatomy and embryology to illustrate how very culture-bound the human sciences were (and are) . Clara Pinto-Correia, a Portuguese developmental biologist and post-doctoral student of Stephen Jay Gould, retells this story with accuracy and with insight. Beginning with the Malpighian history of preformation, she details the development of the various theories of preformation and their complex cultural indebtedness and implications. She then shows how with the rise of scientific embryology in the 18th century, beginning with Spallanzani, the theory of preformation began to be questioned and was eventually overturned as the theory of epigénesis came to be the dominant model for reproduction. Pinto-Correia rehearses this debate in a clear and rather accessible way through her account of the importance of the Enlightenment in the reconstitution of ideas of the human being and the new roles which both parents play in the creation of new and ever-changing life. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 42, 1 ¦ Autumn 1998 | 145 Yet this is not the end of the tale, as Pinto-Correia quite rightly stresses. Powerful theories which are given the aura of truth because of their underlying cultural presuppositions never really disappear. They remain part of the vocabulary of mass culture. So too with preformation. The most recent image of cloning, as inJurassic Park or Dolly (who appeared after the completion of this book) , in which only one parent was really necessary for the existence of the new adult, shows that preformation as a theory has a power which can not be ignored. The insight of PintoCorreia 's work is that she shows how this debate, which was presumed by historians of science to be of interest precisely because it was antiquarian, lives in our own culture. It presents problems which our culture, with its firm understanding of the role of both parents in the shaping of the genetic identity of the child, responds to with fear and anxiety. The power of theories of preformation, as mirrored in Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve, is their insistence on the permanence of inheritance, while those who argue for a social context further the Enlightenment view of the malleability ascribed to epigénesis. Thus, the view that the experiences of the mother (such as listening to classical music) will improve the quality' of the fetus may well be read from both perspectives. This book is an...