What a splendid book!
Although almost everyone seems to get the hang of the preliminaries, understanding how an act of passion can lead to a new life nine months later is rather a challenge.
Shakespeare for example, might have been good at explaining 'love', but neither he nor any of his contemporaries had a clue about the biological process that brings us into the world. It's not surprising, really - the action happens out of sight and involves bits and pieces that are undetectable without a sophisticated microscopes.
This led respected scientists to some remarkable conclusions. For example, it was held that mice could be generated by putting a dirty shirt and some grains of wheat into a bottle; women were widely thought as able to produce rabbits and kittens as bouncing babies. Leonardo da Vinci drew a detailed anatomical diagram of a couple having sex, but his understanding of their internal wiring seems fanciful.
Then, in the 1660s and 1670s, a colourful group of scientists in Holland, collaborating and bickering by turn, started to make significant breakthroughs.
Matthew Cobb's challenge is to make this story accessible. He needs to give the reader enough science to handle some challenging concepts, fix the key players in a historical context that it as at once familiar and very distant, and also put flesh on the bones of characters for whom there is little hard evidence. For the most part, he handles this with some skill, not least when his own enthusiasms show through (Cobb teaches zoology at the University of Manchester and knows more about fruit flies than most would admit).
Almost every page reveals some astonishing fact, and he is good on highlighting striking details. Eventually the story comes to the point at which one of the scientists comes to the conclusion that "all insects proceed from an egg, that is laid by an insect of the same species." Cobb observes that with this statement Jan Swammerdam propelled the whole of natural history into the moden world. It is quite a claim, but without this understanding it is hard to see key areas of practical or theoretical science developing.
Establishing how these processes occur was still shrouded in mystery, but gradually, through skillful dissection and rigorous observation, the function and operation of various organs began to emerge.
Needless to say, the final impression his story leaves is one of wonder. Most 21st Century readers who smile at the idea of spontaneous generation, who cannot accept that a woman's laid in a damp sunny place will turn into snakes, will still admit to a sense of awe that the bizarre process Swammerdam, de Graaf, Leeuwenhoek and others uncovered really does works. It is where we come from, too.
Highly recommended.
