ONCE UPON A TIME, at the dawn of the scientific discipline now known as embryology, there was confusion. How did human beings form and grow? Did they develop gradually before birth (“epigenesis”), or did they exist fully formed in egg or sperm, even before conception (“preformationism”)? And how could we know?
In 1677, The Royal Society of London credited a Dutch maker of optics and lenses, Anton Leeuwenhoek, with the discovery under a microscope of motile sperm. Perhaps jealous for the limelight, another Dutch microscopist, Nicolaas Hartsoeker, claimed he had first seen the wriggling specimens a few years earlier, but in his uncertainty about what they were, he humbly did not publicize his observations. Preformationism of the “ovist” (egg) variety was already in the scientific air, and a cavalcade of nonsense claims by scientists about small humans supposedly seen in sperm cells ensued. And by 1694, the reticent microscopist Hartsoeker was nevertheless not too humble to publish his infamous iillustration of a “homunculus” (“little human”), curled up fully-formed inside the head of a sperm cell . . . even though Hartsoeker never claimed actually to have seen such a thing.
From our modern perspective, these claims all seem foolish and irresponsible. Yet, before we titter too scornfully at these erstwhile “thought leaders,” and the herd mentality that led so many of them into the ditch of error, we should remember: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
When anyone asks me what the three most important issues facing the Congress [sic], I always give the same answer:
-The children
-The children
-The children
Start of a Tweet by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, June 27, 2019
We make a lot of cultural noise about prioritizing “the children,” but in many ways our actions don’t match our rhetoric, and our motives are at best mixed. Despite all our scientific and cultural advances, we still treat children as “homunculi.” We dress them as little adults, advertise directly to them, train them like professional athletes, treat them like co-educators in the classroom; and, in increasingly blatant ways, we pretend they are like adults in the realm of sex and sexuality.
Either we still don’t understand how human beings develop and grow – particularly when it comes to psychological maturation – or we are willing to turn a blind eye to what we do know in order to follow trends, to satisfy adult appetites, and to stay in step with increasingly transgressive elites.
Safe money says: the needs and wants of adults will prevail, even if the results harm “the children.”