Talk:Preformationism

Harvey
I revamped a lot of stuff on Harvey in the philosophical development section. It was unclear to begin with, as it said that Harvey was an epigenesist in one sentence and a preformationist in the next. The confusion makes sense; Harvey did place a lot of importance on eggs. After changing that, I had to rejigger the rest of the section too. I think that takes care of the clarifyme that's been hanging there since last year. Ceramufary (talk) 06:48, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Anecdotic
I move this here, I think it belongs rather to the entry on Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (see WP:TRITE):
 * "Living at a time when sin was virtually synonymous with crime, he was careful to note that his semen samples came from "the excess with which nature provided me in my conjugal relations," and not "sinful contrivance."" (Magner 160)

Lapaz 19:07, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Out-of-Place Statement
I removed the following sentence: "Because of religious creationist bias that pervaded research at the time, preformationists held onto their theories in the face of contravening evidence." My reason is that the paragraphs preceding and following the sentence show that observations seemed to support preformationist theory. The preceding paragraph states that Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Joseph de Aromatari, Marcello Malpighi and Jan Swammerdam all made observations supporting preformation theory. Then, the last sentence in that paragraph is this statement, that, despite contravening evidence, the creationists kept preformationism alive. OK, *what* contravening evidence? None was listed in the paragraph leading up to that point. In fact, the preceding paragraph makes the point that nearly 2 centuries would pass before any theory could explain the lack of evidence for epigenist theory, when the cell theory came along. The paragraph following the sentence that I removed quotes Leeuwenhoek throwing an anvil to the epigenist theory. So, I removed that sentence because it does not fit in with any of the surrounding text. Pooua (talk) 05:45, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Homunculus
I'm changing the line about Nicolas Hartsoeker calling his drawing a homunculus. Hartsoeker actually referred to "petit l'infant" or "le petit animal" and never used the term homunculus. Pinto-Correia thinks this is an important point, since you don't start seeing the term homunculus used to describe the little performed person until F. J. Cole's 1934 "Early Theories of Sexual Generation." There's more good info about Hartsoeker here: Essai de Dioptrique Ceramufary (talk) 02:10, 12 December 2008 (UTC)