by Clara Pinto-Correia

Here is the tale of how a little story became a piece of history. This story is not one of those well-known truisms that sometimes spring from history of science: some embryologsts may never have heard of the tale. But it is written in modern books, and is presented as a real fact of the past. The story typically occupies only one short paragraph. But in that paragraph, a vast number of complex issues of development hide between the lines, including the problem of explaining the generation of monsters. When reconsidering this problem, we are led through a maze of thoughts that include other related issues, such as the conformation of the earth, regeneration, hybridism, and heredity. And, when trying to understand why the story seemed so plausible as to go thoroughly unquestioned by contemporary writers who happened to come across it, we find ourselves once more face to face with the ultimate source of our joys and troubles. The survival of this paragraph was not made possible by humans. As we shall see, it was made possible by God.

What Did They Say?

Here is how Nicolas Andry explained the formation of monstrosities:

If you are willing to play a little quiz game, find in one minute what is wrong with this picture.

If you noticed the use of the term "spermatozoa," you guessed right. The word did not even exist at the time of Andry's work, and entered the literature only two centuries later. The paragraph reproduced above, though repeatedly quoted, is a fabrication of anonymous origin. The tale of the wounded sperm warrior never appeared in the spermist literature.

Here is what Andry really wrote on how the sperm enters the egg: [2]

The unfortunate excluded worms, "like Corn that does not fall upon good Ground," would "die for want of Nourishment."

As an alternative scenario, Andry then mentions a friend of his, "a Physician at the Faculty of Paris, a Man of extraordinary skill in Physic," in whose opinion

But, in Andry's prose, this is not a certainty. He presents his friend's idea solely as "very probable."

The difference between the original writing and the apocryphal version becomes even more amazing when bearing in mind that Andry did write about fetal malformations - in a book called Orthopaedia, which launched modern orthopedic medicine. In this book, children's deformities at birth were explained mainly through mechanical effects suffered by the mother during pregnancy that had pathological repercussions on the development of the fetus. This concept is totally accurate by modern standards, even if rendered in Andry's text with the characteristic ingenuity of pioneering works. In other words, the secondary accounts of the spermists' philosophy credit the first man to address the causes and cures of deformities in children in a serious and systematic manner with the invention of the most delirious tale of the production of such malformations. In the course of two centuries, a sober model for sperm entry became oddly transmuted into a fairy tale for the explanation of monstrosities.

This is not only amazing. It is also bitterly ironic. First of all, Andry's own real model has been confirmed by modern science. In some species - namely, among fishes and insects - the fertilizing spermatozoon fits tightly into a tiny pore at the egg surface (the micropyle) and ensures by this means alone the necessary blockage to the entrance of supernumerary sperm cells. But, most importantly, if Andry's apocryphal model were true, it would have allowed his camp to resolve something for which the other side had no logical explanation. For if the early spermists had actually gone so far in their proposals, they would have scored a point over the ovists. Through the model of the wounded warrior, they could have explained a crucial phenomenon that the ovists were at a total loss to address and that the epigeneticists had the exclusive privilege to cite as a strong supporting argument. If, as the ovists believed, all the future creatures were patiently sitting inside their own eggs waiting for the wake-up call of the aura seminalis, or for the ring of some other kind of alarm clock set by God at the beginning of time, to unfold and start to exist, then it would be hard to explain how something could go wrong and lead to the emergence of deformities. By postulating that embryonic development occurred de novo in each generation, with a gradual formation of the different organs of the body, epigenesis seemed to be much better positioned to offer a clue to such aberrations. It has been said several times that the lack of an explanation for any kind of deviant generation was one of the weakest spots in the fabric of preformation. In Investigations into Generation, Gasking lists some of the efforts of the preformationists in this area:

The question of hybridism definitely posed a problem for epigeneticists as well as for preformationists, since it involved the delicate question of whether or not two different species could actually mate and produce viable and fertile offspring. But the same did not apply to the generation of monsters. In the midst of the tormented search for truth at this front, the model of the wounded warrior could have been a useful simplification. Although Gasking hints at this potential when noting that some preformationists also "held that variations were always due to accidents which befell the developing germ," meaning that "either two germs fused together to produce a monster with supernumerary parts or part of the germ would fail to develop," nothing is thereby explained as to how the addition or loss of parts might have occurred. Yet the idea of a war among sperm cells would have served this purpose perfectly, and in the same breath would have dispensed with "folk myths" and "the like," making the spermist theory sound more plausible. Had the spermists really considered the necessity of a microscopic battle for every birth, they could have provided a novel and dynamic explanation for congenital deformities. Such an explanation would have been made possible only by the discovery of the sperm cells, and that discovery had been made possible only by the use of the microscope. So, by the same token, theirs would have been a truly revolutionary breakthrough in revealing the secrets of an old and perplexing mystery, brought forth by a truly technological discourse, uncovering a system that ovism was unable to accommodate.

A very simple introspective deduction would have made this scenario even more credible. The early microscopists could not see with their simple lenses all that we can see with ours. But they certainly saw millions of creatures swimming around in a very small drop of liquid. These creatures seemed incredibly agitated. We all know that if you put lots of agitated people in an overcrowded, confined space, sooner or later a fight will break out. And, for all the spermists knew, the sperm cells were animals. By definition, they would be even more likely to engage in territorial fights than human beings. It made sense. Perfect sense. Yet the spermists never went that distance when the argument could have worked in their favor. And, by the time the concept of the wounded warrior was finally ascribed to them, the age of innocence was over and the tale no longer made sense. They did not say such a thing when they could have done so, and were quoted as having said it when the idea had become obsolete.

Redemption

The 1990s brought some sort of poetic justice to this unfair outcome. Spermatologists are presently uncovering a number of "sperm wars" that actually occur before fertilization. Due to the attractiveness of the phenomenon (do we not instinctively like all those events that are easily relatable to human behavior?), the "sperm wars" theme did not remain restricted to the relative secrecy of laboratory benches for long: it is now a commonplace feature of pop culture, complete with cartoons, popular writings, and even guest appearances in television specials. In short, we derided the spermists for having conjured up all those absurdities (which, as we have now seen, they never did), only to find ourselves, as a society, buying into exactly the same kind of ideas - and greatly enjoying them. Here is what can be considered a good example of a bad example:

In 1991, Meredith P. Small addressed the issue in a long feature article in the July edition of Discover magazine. With the aim of popularizing modern scientific discoveries, the text sounds amazingly in tune with the tales attributed to the spermists. "Conception . . . is now seen as a do-or-die cellular brawl that determines which males will pass on their genes to the next generation," she wrote.

These wars, as the article explains, are fought mainly between sperm from different males, rather than among sperm from the same ejaculate. But they are vivid, vicious - and real. Some sperm swim faster than others. Some sperm bind to the egg's membranes better than others. Some sperm sacrifice themselves on kamikaze missions to further the success of their brothers, in a behavior reminiscent of the teamwork of colonies of bees or ants.

It is possible that, in most species, the ejaculates contain many more useless sperm than what the specialists now casually call "egg-getters." These ill-fated cells can be two-headed, two-tailed, tailless, motionless, able only to swim in circles, or afflicted by numerous other defects. Their presence in the semen was traditionally considered a byproduct of the enormous numbers of spermatozoa generated in the testes, with the implication that the production of some tens of good "egg-getters" entailed the careless fabrication of hundreds of handicapped counterparts.

Within the more sober realm of basic science, numerous modern spermatologists deem these ideas highly conjectural. Yet, others insist just as seriously that it seems possible that the long-known "useless" sperm actually have a mission: to clear the way for the mighty swimmers and to block the passage of sperm from other males.

Moreover, several laboratories point out that some sperm may carry specific enzymes designed to exterminate or inactivate competitors from foreign ejaculates. And the idea that sperm approaching the egg also use this enzymatic artillery to numb their compatriots that are still in the race has not been totally ruled out. Evolutionary and chemical "sperm warfare" is still the subject of heated debate in developmental biology, and the data keep piling up. Just log in any day at the Australian-based Spermatology Home Page, where new discoveries in this field are reported firsthand (if not necessarily with absolute accuracy) at a steady pace. [3]

Still, this is not a posthumous homage to the clairvoyance of the spermists. If anything, it is a homage to the clairvoyance of the jokes made about them after their deaths.