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In this five-part series, Jonathan Miller returns to his roots in medicine and tells the story of how we came to understand reproduction & heredity. Disposing with the idea of an external, perhapsÌýeven supernatural,Ìývitalising force, he describes how we have arrived at the picture of ourselves and all organisms as Self-Made Things.
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Programme 2
This week Jonathan Miller looks at the birth of ideas about reproduction and heredity. Starting with the ideas of Aristotle and the early Greeks, he argues that because knowledge of underlying structures such as cells and genes are comparatively recent, it was necessary for thinkers addressing the problem, right through the renaissance, to resort to immaterial agents acting upon the raw substances of fertilization.
When addressing theoretical problems, the human tendency to look for purpose rather than mechanism, especially with an issue as fundamental to our condition as reproduction, has taken a long time to disappear from our investigation.
Aristotle's influence on embryological thought was considerable for much of the classical period. But in the 2nd Century AD the Graeco-Roman physician Galen introduced for the first time his rigorous anatomical technique to the argument.
However, it was William Harvey, best known for his work on the circulation of the blood, who made the next major contribution.
But as Jonathan Miller suggests, what links these three thinkers is their epigenetic approach to reproduction. To them, lacking as they did knowledge of any ordered material substrate for explanation of the interaction between semen and the womb, the foetus somehow condensed out of unordered mass.
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