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42 oeuvres 227 utilisateurs 1 Critiques

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.

Œuvres de Clara Pinto Correia

Adeus, Princesa (1985) 24 exemplaires
Stumme Boten (2000) 23 exemplaires
De bloemsteelsteek (1990) 15 exemplaires
A arma dos juízes (2002) 9 exemplaires
Agrião! 6 exemplaires
Domingo de Ramos (1994) 6 exemplaires
A primeira luz da madrugada (2006) 6 exemplaires
Mais marés que marinheiros (1996) 4 exemplaires
O Sapo Francisquinho (1998) 3 exemplaires
E FEZ-SE A LUZ (2006) 3 exemplaires
A mÂusica das esferas (1995) 3 exemplaires
Os Outros Caminhos do Mundo (2008) 3 exemplaires
VITÓRIA VITÓRIA (1991) 3 exemplaires
Das Alphabet der Frauen (1996) 3 exemplaires
No Meio do Nosso Caminho (2005) 2 exemplaires
A Minha Alma está Parva (1992) 2 exemplaires
Complementos Indirectos (2007) 1 exemplaire
Meninas Morenas (2019) 1 exemplaire
Os Monstros de Deus 1 exemplaire
Deus ao Microscópio 1 exemplaire
Canções que já Não Existem (2005) 1 exemplaire

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Pinto-Correia is a professor of Developmental Biology at Universidade Lusofona, in Lisbon, Portugal. The preformation theory of development flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe. The discovery of "animicules", the ubiquitous microscopic creatures that surround us, lead to the conclusion that living things could be infinitely small. The idea then arose that the bodies, or at least parts of bodies, of all generations were contained in the first parent, either Adam or Eve. The usual image is of the Russian dolls that are contained one inside the other.

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)
 
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PuddinTame | Jun 23, 2009 |

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Statistiques

Œuvres
42
Membres
227
Popularité
#99,086
Évaluation
½ 2.5
Critiques
1
ISBN
57
Langues
5

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