BIO 3147 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek, Somatic Cell, Robert Hooke
Document Summary
In terms of this idea of development of life, the earliest record of people talking about it is aristotle. He postulated two explanation or models of how life develops. Homunculus is an example of a preformation idea, basically it"s the spur filled in with a completely formed human body. The idea is that essentially you have a smaller human within a cell and that smaller human just gets bigger and bigger. We are already preformed, we just grow bigger. There were spermists, who believed in the homunculus who believed the sperm had the preformed human. Then there were ovists that believed the egg had the preformed organism. This is the idea that you form shape from nothing. Formation from a non- descript structure or mass. He was able to show there were living organisms moving around in a droplet of water. He said this was the smallest unit of the living organism.
