Clara Pinto Correia
Auteur de The Ovary of Eve: Egg and Sperm and Preformation
A propos de l'auteur
Clara Pinto-Correia is currently Professor and Director of the Masters Degree Program in Developmental Biology at the Universidade Lusofona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Lisbon, Portugal.
Crédit image: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1431229
Œuvres de Clara Pinto Correia
Agrião! 6 exemplaires
Assim na terra como no céu: Ciência, Religião e estruturação do pensamento ocidental (2003) 5 exemplaires
A Maravilhosa Aventura da Vida 1 exemplaire
O Essencial Sobre os «Bebés-Proveta» 1 exemplaire
Os Quatro Rios do Paraíso 1 exemplaire
Quem Tem Medo Compra Um Cão Livro 1 1 exemplaire
Os Monstros de Deus 1 exemplaire
A Maravilhosa Aventura da Vida Uma lição de biologia do desenvolvimento em que se percebe tudo (2009) 1 exemplaire
Fantastico no feminino 1 exemplaire
O essencial sobre bebés proveta 1 exemplaire
Deus ao Microscópio 1 exemplaire
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Autres noms
- Pinto Correia, Maria Clara Amado
- Date de naissance
- 1960-01-30
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- Portugal
- Professions
- cellular biologist
historian of science
university professor
novelist
poet - Organisations
- Universidade Lusofona
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Diário de Notícias
Membres
Critiques
Prix et récompenses
Vous aimerez peut-être aussi
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 42
- Membres
- 227
- Popularité
- #99,086
- Évaluation
- 2.5
- Critiques
- 1
- ISBN
- 57
- Langues
- 5
This story is usually recounted, in brief, as a tale of losers who believed a silly idea. Here Pinto-Correia attempts to tell it without such post-facto judgments. She organizes the material by basic ideas, e.g., ovists, who believed that all future people were contained in the ovary of Eve, spermists, who believed that they were in Adam's testes.
I was disappointed with this book, although I am willing to concede that I simply may not be a receptive audience. I thought that the text consisted too much of quotations and required more explication. At one point, it seemed to me that the quote seemed to allowing for trans-species reincarnation (p.83), which would certainly be surprising in Christian Europe, but I am not sure that I understood what the author was saying. Perhaps they meant that the germ cells were a simpler form in a life cycle, like a pupa? As a modern reader, I was also wondering how the thinkers explained the similarity of children to the parent from whom they were not actually descended, since they were preformed in one or the other. If all children were contained preformed in the ova of Eve, why would they resemble Adam or any other father? And how does one explain hybrids like mules? This is mentioned only briefly here and there. It isn't clear, was this not dealt with in any detail by the preformists, or is this an artifact of the author's organization?
On the other hand, Pinto-Correia devotes 47 pages to the issue of monstrosities, covering all sorts of marginally related topics: mythical hybrids, birth defects, symbolic monsters, exotic animals, natural oddities, etc., with a side trip about regeneration, only to conclude that actually, the issue was not an important one. I emphatically agree with her comment partway through: "We must admit at this point the possibility of having wasted tens of pages on the analysis of a paper tiger." And yet she continues for another 16 pages. Has she not the least sense of irony when she writes disapprovingly of other authors' "delight in repeating folk ideas even if they were too learned and cultivated to believe in them themselves."? The entire point of the chapter is that while birth defects seem to later writers to be a problem for preformationists, it wasn't an issue at the time. Surely 2-3 pages, including examples and illustrations, would have been sufficient.
All in all, It seems like great labor to little purpose. When she stays on point, I don't find the story of preformationism worth the effort and passion that she puts into it, or the time I spent reading it. When she goes off point, her little snippets, some of which are for no apparent reason banished to the notes, simply drag out the agony without being developed enough to be interesting in their own right, although some readers may find them charming. The entire issues involved in several chapters were adequately addressed in a paragraph or two in her "Road Map" in the prologue. If all the digressions were omitted, this could be edited into a worthy magazine article.
The book includes numerous illustrations, a bibliography and index.… (plus d'informations)