October 22, 2024 • 40 mins
Today the idea sounds silly. Why would anyone think nonliving substances can suddenly generate living things? Yet for much of human history, the concept of spontaneous generation was widely accepted. In the first part of this week's two-part episode, Ben, Noel and Max dive into the ridiculous theory of spontaneous generation.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as
always so much for joining us today.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
We're turning the frogs Gay.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
We are absolutely, we are absolutely over the moon to
introduce you to our man, our myth, our legend, our
super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
I am here and I am known to spontaneously combust
Is that what we're talking about today? Yeah? Sort of.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
I'm sorry, I said we're turning the frogs Gap. Sorry,
that was really inappropriate outburst. I do want to apologize.
It's just the idea of spontaneous generation and the notion
that frogs can change sex and all of that stuff,
and it made me think of old Alex Jones. I
wonder how he's doing. He's okay, not well's love to
(01:13):
see it, I said.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
So I am going by Ben Bollen. These days, you
are called Noel Brown. That makes this Ridiculous History. We
are talking, uh this week about a thing called spontaneous generation,
which is familiar to any fan of improvisation. It is
(01:35):
not to be confused with spontaneous combustion. Now, sorry Max, Yeah, no, Noel,
have you ever heard of the idea of spontaneous combustion.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
Sure, yeah, just the idea that someone could inexplicably burst
into flames sounds pretty terrifying.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Like in that old NBA game where you get.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
That he's on fire.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Yeah, that requires badass balling, though this does not even
require that. This would just be like your walking around
and then boom, you're on fire. But not in a
cool dunk kind of way.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, not with that he's on fire, which I love.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Uh smash the rim right.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Spontaneous combustion is not to be confused with spontaneous generation,
the idea that the presence of certain things in certain
locations can suddenly produce other things. But the issue is
non living things produce living organisms.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
If you want to use Biblical terms, you could go
with beget right, yes, begets why?
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Or what? Yeah? Like the worst part of the Torah
and the Bible.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
For sure, the part with all the names and all
the gas gets a little confusing. But it is interesting though,
because at the end of the day, the discussion of
spontaneous generation as a concept sort of pre dating the
rise of modern science, is a conversation about the meaning
of life.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
I agree with that, you know what I mean, yes,
I agree one hundred percent, because what we are going
to study here in ridiculous history this week is really
a noble aspiration, an attempt to understand the world. So
spontaneous generation argues that, for instance, this is one of
(03:23):
the most famous examples, there was an idea for much
of human history that you could take pieces of food, right,
bread or cheese, etc. You could wrap it in rags,
you could put it in a corner of a cellar,
and then boom, it would produce mice.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Produce mice.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
And the thing that strikes me here this is a
discussion of the difference between causation and correlation.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yes, right, yeah, you're one hundred percent on board. Someone
give that guy a.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
Piece of cheese, a plushy and I have a piece
of cheese just for a treat. A little piece of
salami you should.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Get for a prize, you should get one of those
cheesehead hats, yeah, that people wear.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
With a little with a rattue type mouse perched inside
of it telling me what to do, ordering me around.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
So it might look silly. In twenty twenty four, the
idea of spontaneous generation, it's kind of like, I guess
The most recent analog is that if you leave two
microphones in an empty room, podcasters will naturally appear and
start a show.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
Everybody knows that is you summon us. But we can't
stay away. We got to talk into those things, right,
They're like beetle juice, But you don't even have to
say beetle juice one from the show up next.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
If you say it a third time, I swear you're
dead to me.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Guys Quist rules. Also, it sounds, it might sound ridiculous,
but until about the seventeen hundreds, this idea of spontaneous
generation the prevailing scientific explanation for the origin of life, Like,
why was this such a big deal? Where does it
(05:12):
come from? Why is it considered? And we are being
diplomatic here largely incorrect today. No, we have a great
research associate, doctor Z of Legend. Yeah, and he hipped
us to a fantastic exploration of this. And I think
(05:33):
that's our that's sort of our north star this week.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
And what do you say?
Speaker 4 (05:39):
We also make this our cold open and then when
we return, we will dive into these murky pseudo scientific waters.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
And we have returned, folks. Spontaneous generation is and you
know for the time it was an excellent, very logical
explanation and Noel, as we see, this does not originate
from Western philosophers. If we go back to ancient China, gosh,
(06:17):
if we go back to Babylonia, we see a lot
of the same kind of if then something that's right.
Speaker 4 (06:24):
Yeah, and the source that you mentioned, I just want
to go ahead and sight right off the rip comes
from a publication with a lovely acronym SIM with maybe
a soft B at the end, which stands for the
news magazine of the Society of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
This comes from a fantastic paper.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
I mean, it's really more than an article called Spontaneous
Generation an Origin of Life Concepts from Antiquity to the Presence.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Yeah, yeah, And look, folks, if you go back to
the Shong dynasty, which was around sixteen hundred to ten
fifty BCE, you will see earlier arguments for spontaneous generation.
You will also see ancient documents from the Indian subcontinent
(07:11):
that already kind of assume, Hey, where do these aphids
come from? Aphids the insects, they say, well, they're generated
from bamboo. And if you have too much soil or dirt,
or were being honest, poop around. Then flies will grow
from that naturally.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
And you could see how that might be a logical conclusion.
I mean, you know, I had an issue in my
basement where there was blockage in my cleanouts and the
outside like that the tube that can get filled with
muck and debris during rainfall if you don't have it covered.
And idiotically, I did not have mine cover for a
time because the long guy broke the lid and I
(07:53):
did not realize it, and I didn't fix it, and
I had some sewage backing up into my garage.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Guy lawn, not long guy, a long. I just liked
the idea of the long guy.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
He was a bit long. He was a bit of
a long boy. But I just when all of a
sudden there was this slight sewage issue.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
It started to generate again.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
Not knowing the science behind it, one might logically come
to this conclusion sewerflies.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
They were never there before.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
Now all of a sudden, there's a little bit of
poop in the basement and then there's sewerflies. One could
easily assume, without a little bit more information, that the
poop begats the sewerflies.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Begat the goat, the goat, and this is not an
original sin of science. Babylonian clay tablets that come from
eighteen hundred to six hundred BCE, they say, oh, look, guys,
we all know the score river mud makes worms. That's
(08:55):
the only reason worms came to be. And then if
you go to the Greek natural philosopher an Aximander of Militus,
he is the first recognized in the in the Western
discourse as a fan of spontaneous generation.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
And he had a book called on Nature where he
argued that life inevitably develops all of a sudden from
non living matter.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
It's interesting too because he was a big proponent of
these elemental I guess aspects of nature of the universe,
very very captain planet, earth, wind.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Fire, watch, or hearts.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
He didn't have did have heart?
Speaker 4 (09:43):
An Examander had had heart, I think as a person,
but not as one of the elements. He was dealing
mainly with water, earth, fire, and air, and considering these
to be these sort of primordial elements of the universe
and of the formation of life. And it reminds me
a lot of another school of pseudoscientific thought from antiquity,
(10:05):
the idea of humors, the different things in the body,
contained in the body that leads to various maladies, you know,
bile and then what have you, the different humors that
needed to be leeched out or bled out or whatever.
It's very, very similar in terms of like jumping to conclusions.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah, he had a pupil who went with them in
speaking and going with people follow us. There as always joking.
Earlier there was not heart, but he had a heart
as a person. When he was proposing this elemental nature
of the universe and he saw a hierarchical organization of elements,
(10:45):
he said, look, the universe is primarily chaos. It's always
in chaotic motion. However, you have to also consider, in
addition to water, earth, fire, and air, there are intervene
factors wet and dry, hot and cold. He's trying to
explain the world as encountered, and he says, look, when
(11:09):
these things all interact, they generate a Ghostbusters sort of goop,
a terrestrial slime, primordial ooze right right right. And obviously
if you watch Ghostbusters too, it's a clear shout out
to the Greek natural philosopher an Aximander of Militis. He
(11:30):
has a pupil, no guy named an Aximinse, who proposes, look,
these elements are not created equal. Air brings life and
air in Doow's living creatures with motion and thought.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
And then we have someone coming from a little bit
more of an artistic side of these sorts of conclusions,
Xenophones of Colophon, who is a poet and described fossil
imprints of plants and animals in his work and jumped
to the conclusion that the world had changed over time,
suggesting something akin to evolution.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Really, I mean like a cycle of life.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Yes, if we fast forward, then we see implidoples of Erigento,
who says, all right, this idea of spontaneous generation, they
called it generatio spontanea. This comes from the four elements.
And he says, earth, water, fire, and air have combined
(12:38):
in different ways, and the ways in which they combine
over time can yield either cohesion or chaos in different
life forms.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
We also hear from a bit of a more well
known figure in Aristotle, the Greek scientists and full and
just all around thinky type fellow who theorized a lot
about reproduction, about the creation of life, man, animals, et cetera.
But his colleague and successor you probably have also heard
(13:14):
of Theophrastus, maybe not quite as.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Big of a hit.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
He was a little bit more focused in studying plants
and minerals. So while Aristotle in Historia Animalium and Degeneratition
Animalium posited that bivalves, which are I believe like mollusks,
you know, and snails were generated sprang forth from mud scallops,
(13:42):
on the other hand, from sand uh and.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Eels from earthworms. That's an interesting leap.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
It's kind of like the idea, you know, you find
the thing where it exists, it must have been created
by that environment.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
Well, and given the lack of psi antific technology and understanding,
they were doing the best they could with what they had.
And these are very intelligent people. And it is fascinating
to go through the great thinkers of antiquity, whether they
be philosophical or scientific. I think the philosophical thinkers tend
(14:18):
to hold a little more water and are able to
kind of be applied to the modern day a little
bit more because those types of things can be sort
of adapted, whereas a scientific theory saying that you know,
eels come from earthworms. Given enough time, study and technology
can pretty easily be debunked, but philosophical.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Concepts can be a little bit more applicable.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Yeah, and I like that because when we're debating philosophical concepts,
we're looking at abstract interactions, right, We're looking at logic
and calculus, and those things are able to hold true
as almost said protean. But as you know, like platonic forms, right,
(15:06):
the X plus they equal z is a thing that
can be applied to multiple very specific iterations. And Aristotle's
view had a tremendous impact and supported a strong belief
in the concept of spontaneous generation that lasted for at
(15:28):
least two thousand years. Even if you fast forward you'll
see that. You'll see that notable architects and engineers are
citing Aristotle when they say, hey, we got to do
They didn't call it fun shue, but they were kind
of doing a func stue thing. They said, look, our
libraries have to face east so that they can get
(15:50):
the morning sun, because if we face the entrance to
the library on the south or the west, we'll get
the winds that worms that are bad for books.
Speaker 4 (16:03):
Worms are the natural enemy of books. Everybody knows that. No,
I don't know about that. But it's interesting too when
you think about the facing of structures, Like my house,
for example, doesn't have particularly good access to morning lights.
So if I put plants in certain parts of the house,
they die. And I only just kind of took me
a minute to realize that, like, you really need to
(16:25):
find the part of the house that is facing the
morning sun. And then once I moved the plants to
that side of the house, life began to flourish. So again,
without knowing how this stuff works exactly, you're kind of
left with just sort of a cause and effect, or
left with just sort of trying things out and seeing
what works. And while facing the library in that direction,
(16:46):
maybe it didn't directly have an impact on worms being generated,
it might have had an impact on conditions that would
have been more suitable for the creation of worms for
them to flourish.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
This brings us to one of the most important parts
of this week's exploration, Fellow ridiculous historians, the people of
the past. And I feel like I have to say
this all the time. The people of the past were
no more less less intelligent, nor were they more intelligent
(17:18):
than you and everyone you have met here. As we
record in twenty twenty four, humans haven't even figured out
the calendar. What we're looking at is some of the
great thinkers of the time trying to understand the world
around them, and honestly, with the resources they had, they
(17:39):
did a bang up job. What Aristotle's really talking about.
Another another fancier word for spontaneous generation would be abiogenesis,
the theoretical natural process by which life arises from non
(18:03):
living matter. And get this, folks, outside of the pan
spermia theory, no one has figured out to date how
life began as a thing on the planet Earth. So
lest we cast stones on philosophers of old, let's please
(18:23):
remember that those folks were the scientists of their day,
and abiogenesis is something that people wrestle with even now
in the modern evenings. We owe a lot to Arabic translations.
For a long time, the Arabic speaking world was the
(18:44):
center of intellectualism in the Near East or Western Asia
and Western Europe or Europe overall. So it was they
who bought the idea of abiogenesis or spontaneous general to
Western Europe. Via Arabic translation, and it like if you
(19:06):
go back to the twelve hundreds, the thirteenth century, that's
when Latin translations of these ideas become available. And some
of your favorite historical figures were ten toes down on this.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
That's right, even though Willie shakes himself, William Shakespeare mentions
the idea that snakes and crocodiles were in fact formed
from the you know, muddy soils of the of the
delta in the Nile.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Also our buddy Thomas A Tommy A Thomas Aquinas. It's
Thomas As, yes, yes, best known as the creator of Dessauni.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
True, but yeah, a lot of this stuff sticks around
for a while. And because of the cultures that kind
of originated some of these thoughts and then also responsible
for spreading of everything from theology to science to philosophy,
and that stuff got picked up and telephoned its way
around the world.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
And here we want to give a special shout out
to the scholar Edna Maki Nixon k nis k e
m who points out that we do have to exercise
empathy with people in these situations. Right, So we're about
in the twelve hundreds and this author says quote, it
(20:31):
is well for us to consider, however, that the theory
of spontaneous generation, it did not have to, in other words,
rise to the forefront. Anybody walked around, they heard about
spontaneous generation, and they would say, yeah, I've seen bad fruit,
I've seen bad meat. All of a sudden, now I
see flies, I see maggots. You know, how did I
(20:55):
not see it before? How did I see it now?
Obviously Lee, something is at play, and they don't have
germ theory, right, they don't have microscopes.
Speaker 4 (21:06):
And so it's like I was saying with the I mean,
these are You're right to your point about microscopes. Things
are tiny in terms of the eggs and the tiny
creatures that lay the eggs. But you know, that's why
I mentioned the whole thing with the sewer flies. And
like my basement situation, if I was not, you know,
endowed with a minor amount of scientific you know know how,
which is not much to say. I'm not a scientist
(21:29):
by a long shot, but I know enough to know
that those flies did not come from the sewery stuff,
the poop, you know, I know that they are attracted
to those types of conditions and that is what allows
them to flourish through reproduction, you.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Know, in terms of laying of eggs and then hatching
of eggs.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
And so fast forward further. Let's get to you know,
let's get to like the sixteenth century or so. We
see that a lot of folks in Europe, a lot
of boffins are picking up on this idea and they
they absolutely dig it. That's a dig for Worm's joke.
(22:13):
It'll be funnier in our weird sports episode.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
A hand dug American worm.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yes. Yeah, there's a guy named van Helmont. He's a
Belgian physician and he was actually pretty good at chemistry.
He got past the rubicon of when alchemy transforms into chemistry.
And this guy, this is the example is said in
earlier he totally believes. Again he's one of the smartest
(22:44):
people in his area at the time. He totally believes
that he has seen rats spontaneously generate from bags of
grains and old rags. And then we have to also
mention not everybody cottoned to this prevailing theory of the time.
(23:06):
There were a lot of folks who said, hang on,
you can't just say that things created stuff as you
were saying earlier, correlation is not causation. Right, Just because
there are Elvis impersonators in Las Vegas, it doesn't mean
that someone singing, Ah, what's the good Love Me Tenders?
(23:31):
Ago when Yeah, it doesn't mean that every time someone
in a karaoke bar and Las Vegas sings love Me
Tender and Elvis impersonator is born. This is not my
best comparison, but I I think it holds. Yeah, I do.
I do.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
And and what also holds is that at this time
there were advances. There were beginning to be advances, if
not necessarily in like the kind of technology that we
think of today in terms of lab tech, but in
the observations and ability to kind of put some puzzle
pieces together, at least beginning to there were many more
(24:08):
scientists that were accepting theories that leaned much more on
the idea of propagation rather than spontaneous generation, the idea
that the egg or sperm contained the abilities within to
form new individuals which were able to grow given the
(24:29):
proper circumstances.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Yeah, and this is where we see the noble story
of the humans writ large, because when we're talking about
why spontaneous generation as a theory is not currently accepted
as fact. What we're really doing is exploring the evolution
of how to ask questions scientific inquiry. Today we call
(24:57):
it the scientific method.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
So what's the vast forward? Just a bit more?
Speaker 4 (25:02):
Like you said, been to Francisco Ready, who was a
court physician to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, A fellow
by the name of Ferdinand Medici of the Mediici Medachis.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
You may have heard of.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
He was also a member of the Academy of Experiments
in Florence, Italy. We know, Italy was responsible for this
Enlightenment kind of thinking, you know, which was a flourishing
of just thought that created, you know, some of the
greatest advances in literature, science, philosophy.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
This academy was a big part of that. They'd been
organized by a.
Speaker 4 (25:36):
Group of Galileo Galiles former students, and it was very
much a signpost of this new type of enlightenment thinking.
And Ready was a big conductor of some very very
well thought out and scientifically rigorous etymological studies that he
(26:00):
chronicles in a book called Experiments on the Generation of Insects.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
In this work he.
Speaker 4 (26:07):
Used a very rigorous form of scientific method in order
to conduct his experiments, which today would be looked at
as being pretty modern. And just want to call back
to the source that Ben mentioned earlier, Eastern Illinois University,
the Keep and a paper titled The Fallen Rise of
Spontaneous Generation Theory by Edna Mackie Kniskern.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
And this was, or this, i should say, paved the
way for what we call the scientific method today. So
everybody put your grade school boffen had on and realize, please,
this was bleeding edge science and philosophy. And when you
get to the when you get to the top tier
of science and philosophy, there's a heck of a Venn diagram.
(26:53):
So no, what say we round, Robin? This will give
you the steps. Here's the first one. Let's say, Max,
can we get some like I'm figuring stuff out in
medieval Europe?
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Perfect? All right?
Speaker 2 (27:12):
So that's our you know, yeah, thank you for the loot,
dear Max. Our first step is observation, what there are
flies around meat caucuses at the butcher shop?
Speaker 4 (27:26):
Oh yeah, the old z butcher shop. This is the
first step. You have observed something with thine own eyes,
which then lead to the formation in thy mind palace
of a question. Which is where do the flies come from?
Does rotting needs turn into or produce the flies? Not
(27:48):
going to keep his voice up for the whole round robin,
but I think, yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
And there there are seven steps, is boff and still
the third wood Max, let me get a turn in
the music. The old hypothesis or HYPOTHESI they might have called, right, sure, yeah,
the rotten meat does not turn into flies. It seems
(28:15):
to be only flies can make more flies. And so
we've seen what's happening. We asked ourselves why we said,
maybe we have an answer. How do we test the answer?
Speaker 4 (28:36):
So I guess I've always kind of thought, is the
hypothesis and the prediction is sort of being one and
the same, But here they are kind of listed as
two different steps, which I think makes sense. The hypothesis
is that rotten meat doesn't turn into flies, only flies
can make more flies, like we said, so that leads
us to a prediction that would be the thing that
can be tested. The prediction being if meat cannot turn
(28:56):
into flies, rotting meat in a sealed fly proof he
should not produce flies or maggots.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
And now so we're at four. So now we get
to number five, which is how do we test our hypothesis?
How do we test our prediction? Well, we need a trial, right,
and so what we would do here and I'm not
going to do the voice because I really respect this part.
What we do here is we create two different situations.
(29:28):
If we assume that wide mouthed jars each having a
piece of meat, are you know if we if we
keep those together and we make everything the same, they're
stored in the same place. The only difference is there
is one variable. Our control group will be the jars
(29:50):
of meat without lids. This means the meat is exposed
to whatever whatever is happening in the butchery. And then
our experimental group, the part where we test our hypothesis,
means that we have a couple of jars that are
sealed up tight with lids. And then if we want
to get super cool with it, we have another experimental group.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
We try a middle ground.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Right, we make a permeable or a porous somewhat porous lid.
We just place gauze or cheese cloth. They made it.
They may have called it over there, so that's fine.
We start to test our questions and then we try
to replicate our questions. And then and I know, I know,
(30:35):
I know, I know at least twelve of you, fellow
ridiculous historians are excited about this part. We figure out
the results.
Speaker 4 (30:43):
Yeah, through the study of data sets that are generated
by each of these different groups of experiments, these different trials.
So the what we're looking for, of course, are the
presence or absence of flies and maggots that are related
to each of these different scenarios, whether it be the
open to the air jars, the ones that are air tight,
(31:06):
or the ones with a permeable piece of some kind
of cloth on top. So, in the controlled group of jars,
which would be the wide open ones, flies can be
observed visually entering the jars. Then, given a little bit
of time, one could observe maggots beginning to wriggle around
in there, followed by more flies than in the gauze
(31:29):
covered jars.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
No flies were.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
Seen in the jars, but they are observed hanging around
on the outside because they smell that sweet, sweet funk
of decaying meat.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah, as any slip knot fan knows, right. This leads
us all to our very favorite part conclusions, only flies
can make more flies. We see that as you were
pointing out nol with an aggregation. In comparison of data,
the uncovered jars seem to produce more flies. Our conclusion
(32:05):
being that flies from somewhere else came inside without that
barrier and laid eggs on the meat. Maggots hatch from
those eggs that the flies have made, and they grow
into more adult flies. Only flies can make more flies.
The adult flies lay eggs on the gauze, the porous
(32:26):
border of those jars, and those eggs are small enough
to drop through your cheesecloth or what have you, onto
the meat. But in the sealed jars, none of those
variables can enter, and so you don't see spontaneous generation.
This is the scientific method seven steps. As you said,
(32:49):
we separated them out a bit to be nerdy. We
hope that everybody listening here approves of nerdom.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
I would hope, so gosh, if not, then what are
you doing here? But no, please stay.
Speaker 4 (33:03):
But yeah, this led to a sea change you know,
in public perception of what led to the creation of life,
But it wasn't across the board. This was a massive
shift in the way people thought about the generation of
quote unquote larger organisms you know, and I know flies
(33:24):
are not exactly large, but they're certainly larger than bacterium,
for example.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Bro Flies are pretty much tied you to smaller organism's right, right, Yeah, exactly,
So there was still a lot of thinking while it
had this thinking had been refined through the scientific method
and also, of course, with the.
Speaker 4 (33:43):
Creation of the innovation of the microscope in the sixteen hundreds,
people began to observe all sorts of other, much more
microscopic forms of life, and for a time didn't know
where the hell they were coming from because they could
not observe what had been observed by the naked eye
in this previous experiment with the mean.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
And the foy.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
I saw some gross stuff.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Yeah, so, Noel, can you do us as solid and
name some of these new very small life forms that
were discovered.
Speaker 4 (34:18):
Yeah, yeast, yeasty life forms, fungi, bacteria, like I mentioned, protists,
Oh okay.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
Yeah, I love I love the protests And yeah, It's true.
Speaker 4 (34:31):
Despite the absolute blast forward in scientific thinking and innovation
and observation, there just wasn't yet, even with some of
these new technologies, the ability to really get a hold
on where these.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Things were coming from.
Speaker 4 (34:47):
So spontaneous generation kind of reared its head again with
a lot of people assuming that things like molds and
fungi and what have you actually sprang forth from things
like spoiled food. Spoiled broth, for example, is one that's
mentioned in another great piece of work from Northern Arizona
University that doctor Z found for us.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Pronounced now do you, of course ye, yes, as is known.
This is where we're meeting Jean Baptiste Lamark, who proposed
his own theory of evolution, which was a I would
say it was an attempt to kind of do a
DJ Khalid level remix of scientific thought at the time
(35:30):
to reconcile these various ideas. And he said, if you
he is a predecessor of Darwin. Darwin's great discoveries right
sailing on the Beagle where he ate every animal and
he encountered that is the first shout out to Jack
O'Brien over at Daily Zeitgeist. So our buddy Lamark says, look,
(35:56):
all things strive for perfection, and as they become closer
to perfect new organisms spontaneously arrive to do what corporate
America will call backfill. So if yeah, so if the
you know, let's say a particular small multicellular organism grows
(36:24):
into something larger than a new organism will spontaneously arrive
to keep that lion king circle of life going.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
Ah. So yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (36:35):
And I don't think we mentioned this at the top,
but Aristotle is still relevant to a lot of these newer,
kind of more modern thinkers because while he was a
big proponent of spontaneous generation, Aristotle, there were parts of
his research and thinking that he laid out in various
works that did acknowledge sexual reproduction.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Yeah, of course, yeah, Aristotle was Aristotle was not tyrannical
in thought. Aristotle was kind of his whole deal, right
like that. He was the guy who came in and
way before podcast and propagandists became problematic with this. He
was a good faith asker saying I'm just asking questions,
(37:18):
you know what I mean, like what if this? And
then he would sometimes contradict himself and he would say, well,
also what if this, Either of these things could be true.
I'll tell you what is true. However, this is as
we said, and we always celebrate this a two part episode, correct, oh.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
A preemptive two part episode.
Speaker 4 (37:40):
And you mentioned Jean Baptiste Lamark and his you know,
kind of beginnings of theories of evolution, and he really
was trying to kind of reconcile some of his thinking
with Aristotle's work contained in Scala Nature that he you know,
where he kind of laid out this notion of like
striving for perfection, which is of course a big part
(38:01):
of evolution, the idea of survival of the fittest, about
finding the best form, the best ultimate version of a
thing over time, and then all of the things that
kind of filled in.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
Those spaces underneath.
Speaker 4 (38:15):
So I do think you're right on the money, Ben,
that we wrap up part one of this episode, this
very science science y episode of ridiculous history, and offer
our huge thanks and shout out to doctor Z Research
Associate extraordinaire on this two part journey.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
Yes, doctor Z personal thanks to you, sir, hope you
are doing well. Big big thanks of course, as well
to super producer mister Max Williams our composer Alex Williams,
who has been sending some updates from the road. I
don't know, it might be cool to have Alex back
on the show too.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
He's got one hundred percent.
Speaker 4 (38:53):
She does he's got some some hot takes that Alex
Williams love him dearly.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Big big thanks, of course to our favorite mad scientist,
Jonathan Strickland aka the quizt and obviously Noel, big thanks
to brother Dan soft.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
It gota love, good old bds.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Who else, who else? Who else?
Speaker 4 (39:16):
Oh geez, of course Christoph frasciotis, and he's Jeff COEs
here in spirit, aj Bahamas Jacobs the Puzzler. We already
mentioned our boy the Quizzer. Long may he rain in infamy.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Oh and I'll say something that might be a hot take,
fellow ridiculous historians in academia. Don't want to get you mad,
but big big thanks to everyone throughout history who was
trying to just figure stuff.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
Out doing their best.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
You know, And look, any time you encounter something in
your life that is an invention that you think is cool,
you should also thank the people who came before. They're
a big deal. They got a a lot of stuff wrong,
but they're a big deal.
Speaker 4 (40:02):
Standing on the shoulders of imperfect giants.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
I think it's really the only way to fly.
Speaker 4 (40:06):
And you know, I appreciate you mentioning that, Ben, And
in that spirit, we will see you next time, folks.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as
always so much for joining us today.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
We're turning the frogs Gay.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
We are absolutely, we are absolutely over the moon to
introduce you to our man, our myth, our legend, our
super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
I am here and I am known to spontaneously combust
Is that what we're talking about today? Yeah? Sort of.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
I'm sorry, I said we're turning the frogs Gap. Sorry,
that was really inappropriate outburst. I do want to apologize.
It's just the idea of spontaneous generation and the notion
that frogs can change sex and all of that stuff,
and it made me think of old Alex Jones. I
wonder how he's doing. He's okay, not well's love to
(01:13):
see it, I said.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
So I am going by Ben Bollen. These days, you
are called Noel Brown. That makes this Ridiculous History. We
are talking, uh this week about a thing called spontaneous generation,
which is familiar to any fan of improvisation. It is
(01:35):
not to be confused with spontaneous combustion. Now, sorry Max, Yeah, no, Noel,
have you ever heard of the idea of spontaneous combustion.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
Sure, yeah, just the idea that someone could inexplicably burst
into flames sounds pretty terrifying.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Like in that old NBA game where you get.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
That he's on fire.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Yeah, that requires badass balling, though this does not even
require that. This would just be like your walking around
and then boom, you're on fire. But not in a
cool dunk kind of way.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, not with that he's on fire, which I love.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Uh smash the rim right.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Spontaneous combustion is not to be confused with spontaneous generation,
the idea that the presence of certain things in certain
locations can suddenly produce other things. But the issue is
non living things produce living organisms.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
If you want to use Biblical terms, you could go
with beget right, yes, begets why?
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Or what? Yeah? Like the worst part of the Torah
and the Bible.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
For sure, the part with all the names and all
the gas gets a little confusing. But it is interesting though,
because at the end of the day, the discussion of
spontaneous generation as a concept sort of pre dating the
rise of modern science, is a conversation about the meaning
of life.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
I agree with that, you know what I mean, yes,
I agree one hundred percent, because what we are going
to study here in ridiculous history this week is really
a noble aspiration, an attempt to understand the world. So
spontaneous generation argues that, for instance, this is one of
(03:23):
the most famous examples, there was an idea for much
of human history that you could take pieces of food, right,
bread or cheese, etc. You could wrap it in rags,
you could put it in a corner of a cellar,
and then boom, it would produce mice.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Produce mice.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
And the thing that strikes me here this is a
discussion of the difference between causation and correlation.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yes, right, yeah, you're one hundred percent on board. Someone
give that guy a.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
Piece of cheese, a plushy and I have a piece
of cheese just for a treat. A little piece of
salami you should.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Get for a prize, you should get one of those
cheesehead hats, yeah, that people wear.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
With a little with a rattue type mouse perched inside
of it telling me what to do, ordering me around.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
So it might look silly. In twenty twenty four, the
idea of spontaneous generation, it's kind of like, I guess
The most recent analog is that if you leave two
microphones in an empty room, podcasters will naturally appear and
start a show.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
Everybody knows that is you summon us. But we can't
stay away. We got to talk into those things, right,
They're like beetle juice, But you don't even have to
say beetle juice one from the show up next.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
If you say it a third time, I swear you're
dead to me.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Guys Quist rules. Also, it sounds, it might sound ridiculous,
but until about the seventeen hundreds, this idea of spontaneous
generation the prevailing scientific explanation for the origin of life, Like,
why was this such a big deal? Where does it
(05:12):
come from? Why is it considered? And we are being
diplomatic here largely incorrect today. No, we have a great
research associate, doctor Z of Legend. Yeah, and he hipped
us to a fantastic exploration of this. And I think
(05:33):
that's our that's sort of our north star this week.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
And what do you say?
Speaker 4 (05:39):
We also make this our cold open and then when
we return, we will dive into these murky pseudo scientific waters.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
And we have returned, folks. Spontaneous generation is and you
know for the time it was an excellent, very logical
explanation and Noel, as we see, this does not originate
from Western philosophers. If we go back to ancient China, gosh,
(06:17):
if we go back to Babylonia, we see a lot
of the same kind of if then something that's right.
Speaker 4 (06:24):
Yeah, and the source that you mentioned, I just want
to go ahead and sight right off the rip comes
from a publication with a lovely acronym SIM with maybe
a soft B at the end, which stands for the
news magazine of the Society of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
This comes from a fantastic paper.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
I mean, it's really more than an article called Spontaneous
Generation an Origin of Life Concepts from Antiquity to the Presence.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Yeah, yeah, And look, folks, if you go back to
the Shong dynasty, which was around sixteen hundred to ten
fifty BCE, you will see earlier arguments for spontaneous generation.
You will also see ancient documents from the Indian subcontinent
(07:11):
that already kind of assume, Hey, where do these aphids
come from? Aphids the insects, they say, well, they're generated
from bamboo. And if you have too much soil or dirt,
or were being honest, poop around. Then flies will grow
from that naturally.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
And you could see how that might be a logical conclusion.
I mean, you know, I had an issue in my
basement where there was blockage in my cleanouts and the
outside like that the tube that can get filled with
muck and debris during rainfall if you don't have it covered.
And idiotically, I did not have mine cover for a
time because the long guy broke the lid and I
(07:53):
did not realize it, and I didn't fix it, and
I had some sewage backing up into my garage.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Guy lawn, not long guy, a long. I just liked
the idea of the long guy.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
He was a bit long. He was a bit of
a long boy. But I just when all of a
sudden there was this slight sewage issue.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
It started to generate again.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
Not knowing the science behind it, one might logically come
to this conclusion sewerflies.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
They were never there before.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
Now all of a sudden, there's a little bit of
poop in the basement and then there's sewerflies. One could
easily assume, without a little bit more information, that the
poop begats the sewerflies.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Begat the goat, the goat, and this is not an
original sin of science. Babylonian clay tablets that come from
eighteen hundred to six hundred BCE, they say, oh, look, guys,
we all know the score river mud makes worms. That's
(08:55):
the only reason worms came to be. And then if
you go to the Greek natural philosopher an Aximander of Militus,
he is the first recognized in the in the Western
discourse as a fan of spontaneous generation.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
And he had a book called on Nature where he
argued that life inevitably develops all of a sudden from
non living matter.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
It's interesting too because he was a big proponent of
these elemental I guess aspects of nature of the universe,
very very captain planet, earth, wind.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Fire, watch, or hearts.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
He didn't have did have heart?
Speaker 4 (09:43):
An Examander had had heart, I think as a person,
but not as one of the elements. He was dealing
mainly with water, earth, fire, and air, and considering these
to be these sort of primordial elements of the universe
and of the formation of life. And it reminds me
a lot of another school of pseudoscientific thought from antiquity,
(10:05):
the idea of humors, the different things in the body,
contained in the body that leads to various maladies, you know,
bile and then what have you, the different humors that
needed to be leeched out or bled out or whatever.
It's very, very similar in terms of like jumping to conclusions.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah, he had a pupil who went with them in
speaking and going with people follow us. There as always joking.
Earlier there was not heart, but he had a heart
as a person. When he was proposing this elemental nature
of the universe and he saw a hierarchical organization of elements,
(10:45):
he said, look, the universe is primarily chaos. It's always
in chaotic motion. However, you have to also consider, in
addition to water, earth, fire, and air, there are intervene
factors wet and dry, hot and cold. He's trying to
explain the world as encountered, and he says, look, when
(11:09):
these things all interact, they generate a Ghostbusters sort of goop,
a terrestrial slime, primordial ooze right right right. And obviously
if you watch Ghostbusters too, it's a clear shout out
to the Greek natural philosopher an Aximander of Militis. He
(11:30):
has a pupil, no guy named an Aximinse, who proposes, look,
these elements are not created equal. Air brings life and
air in Doow's living creatures with motion and thought.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
And then we have someone coming from a little bit
more of an artistic side of these sorts of conclusions,
Xenophones of Colophon, who is a poet and described fossil
imprints of plants and animals in his work and jumped
to the conclusion that the world had changed over time,
suggesting something akin to evolution.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Really, I mean like a cycle of life.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Yes, if we fast forward, then we see implidoples of Erigento,
who says, all right, this idea of spontaneous generation, they
called it generatio spontanea. This comes from the four elements.
And he says, earth, water, fire, and air have combined
(12:38):
in different ways, and the ways in which they combine
over time can yield either cohesion or chaos in different
life forms.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
We also hear from a bit of a more well
known figure in Aristotle, the Greek scientists and full and
just all around thinky type fellow who theorized a lot
about reproduction, about the creation of life, man, animals, et cetera.
But his colleague and successor you probably have also heard
(13:14):
of Theophrastus, maybe not quite as.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Big of a hit.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
He was a little bit more focused in studying plants
and minerals. So while Aristotle in Historia Animalium and Degeneratition
Animalium posited that bivalves, which are I believe like mollusks,
you know, and snails were generated sprang forth from mud scallops,
(13:42):
on the other hand, from sand uh and.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Eels from earthworms. That's an interesting leap.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
It's kind of like the idea, you know, you find
the thing where it exists, it must have been created
by that environment.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
Well, and given the lack of psi antific technology and understanding,
they were doing the best they could with what they had.
And these are very intelligent people. And it is fascinating
to go through the great thinkers of antiquity, whether they
be philosophical or scientific. I think the philosophical thinkers tend
(14:18):
to hold a little more water and are able to
kind of be applied to the modern day a little
bit more because those types of things can be sort
of adapted, whereas a scientific theory saying that you know,
eels come from earthworms. Given enough time, study and technology
can pretty easily be debunked, but philosophical.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Concepts can be a little bit more applicable.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Yeah, and I like that because when we're debating philosophical concepts,
we're looking at abstract interactions, right, We're looking at logic
and calculus, and those things are able to hold true
as almost said protean. But as you know, like platonic forms, right,
(15:06):
the X plus they equal z is a thing that
can be applied to multiple very specific iterations. And Aristotle's
view had a tremendous impact and supported a strong belief
in the concept of spontaneous generation that lasted for at
(15:28):
least two thousand years. Even if you fast forward you'll
see that. You'll see that notable architects and engineers are
citing Aristotle when they say, hey, we got to do
They didn't call it fun shue, but they were kind
of doing a func stue thing. They said, look, our
libraries have to face east so that they can get
(15:50):
the morning sun, because if we face the entrance to
the library on the south or the west, we'll get
the winds that worms that are bad for books.
Speaker 4 (16:03):
Worms are the natural enemy of books. Everybody knows that. No,
I don't know about that. But it's interesting too when
you think about the facing of structures, Like my house,
for example, doesn't have particularly good access to morning lights.
So if I put plants in certain parts of the house,
they die. And I only just kind of took me
a minute to realize that, like, you really need to
(16:25):
find the part of the house that is facing the
morning sun. And then once I moved the plants to
that side of the house, life began to flourish. So again,
without knowing how this stuff works exactly, you're kind of
left with just sort of a cause and effect, or
left with just sort of trying things out and seeing
what works. And while facing the library in that direction,
(16:46):
maybe it didn't directly have an impact on worms being generated,
it might have had an impact on conditions that would
have been more suitable for the creation of worms for
them to flourish.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
This brings us to one of the most important parts
of this week's exploration, Fellow ridiculous historians, the people of
the past. And I feel like I have to say
this all the time. The people of the past were
no more less less intelligent, nor were they more intelligent
(17:18):
than you and everyone you have met here. As we
record in twenty twenty four, humans haven't even figured out
the calendar. What we're looking at is some of the
great thinkers of the time trying to understand the world
around them, and honestly, with the resources they had, they
(17:39):
did a bang up job. What Aristotle's really talking about.
Another another fancier word for spontaneous generation would be abiogenesis,
the theoretical natural process by which life arises from non
(18:03):
living matter. And get this, folks, outside of the pan
spermia theory, no one has figured out to date how
life began as a thing on the planet Earth. So
lest we cast stones on philosophers of old, let's please
(18:23):
remember that those folks were the scientists of their day,
and abiogenesis is something that people wrestle with even now
in the modern evenings. We owe a lot to Arabic translations.
For a long time, the Arabic speaking world was the
(18:44):
center of intellectualism in the Near East or Western Asia
and Western Europe or Europe overall. So it was they
who bought the idea of abiogenesis or spontaneous general to
Western Europe. Via Arabic translation, and it like if you
(19:06):
go back to the twelve hundreds, the thirteenth century, that's
when Latin translations of these ideas become available. And some
of your favorite historical figures were ten toes down on this.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
That's right, even though Willie shakes himself, William Shakespeare mentions
the idea that snakes and crocodiles were in fact formed
from the you know, muddy soils of the of the
delta in the Nile.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Also our buddy Thomas A Tommy A Thomas Aquinas. It's
Thomas As, yes, yes, best known as the creator of Dessauni.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
True, but yeah, a lot of this stuff sticks around
for a while. And because of the cultures that kind
of originated some of these thoughts and then also responsible
for spreading of everything from theology to science to philosophy,
and that stuff got picked up and telephoned its way
around the world.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
And here we want to give a special shout out
to the scholar Edna Maki Nixon k nis k e
m who points out that we do have to exercise
empathy with people in these situations. Right, So we're about
in the twelve hundreds and this author says quote, it
(20:31):
is well for us to consider, however, that the theory
of spontaneous generation, it did not have to, in other words,
rise to the forefront. Anybody walked around, they heard about
spontaneous generation, and they would say, yeah, I've seen bad fruit,
I've seen bad meat. All of a sudden, now I
see flies, I see maggots. You know, how did I
(20:55):
not see it before? How did I see it now?
Obviously Lee, something is at play, and they don't have
germ theory, right, they don't have microscopes.
Speaker 4 (21:06):
And so it's like I was saying with the I mean,
these are You're right to your point about microscopes. Things
are tiny in terms of the eggs and the tiny
creatures that lay the eggs. But you know, that's why
I mentioned the whole thing with the sewer flies. And
like my basement situation, if I was not, you know,
endowed with a minor amount of scientific you know know how,
which is not much to say. I'm not a scientist
(21:29):
by a long shot, but I know enough to know
that those flies did not come from the sewery stuff,
the poop, you know, I know that they are attracted
to those types of conditions and that is what allows
them to flourish through reproduction, you.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Know, in terms of laying of eggs and then hatching
of eggs.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
And so fast forward further. Let's get to you know,
let's get to like the sixteenth century or so. We
see that a lot of folks in Europe, a lot
of boffins are picking up on this idea and they
they absolutely dig it. That's a dig for Worm's joke.
(22:13):
It'll be funnier in our weird sports episode.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
A hand dug American worm.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yes. Yeah, there's a guy named van Helmont. He's a
Belgian physician and he was actually pretty good at chemistry.
He got past the rubicon of when alchemy transforms into chemistry.
And this guy, this is the example is said in
earlier he totally believes. Again he's one of the smartest
(22:44):
people in his area at the time. He totally believes
that he has seen rats spontaneously generate from bags of
grains and old rags. And then we have to also
mention not everybody cottoned to this prevailing theory of the time.
(23:06):
There were a lot of folks who said, hang on,
you can't just say that things created stuff as you
were saying earlier, correlation is not causation. Right, Just because
there are Elvis impersonators in Las Vegas, it doesn't mean
that someone singing, Ah, what's the good Love Me Tenders?
(23:31):
Ago when Yeah, it doesn't mean that every time someone
in a karaoke bar and Las Vegas sings love Me
Tender and Elvis impersonator is born. This is not my
best comparison, but I I think it holds. Yeah, I do.
I do.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
And and what also holds is that at this time
there were advances. There were beginning to be advances, if
not necessarily in like the kind of technology that we
think of today in terms of lab tech, but in
the observations and ability to kind of put some puzzle
pieces together, at least beginning to there were many more
(24:08):
scientists that were accepting theories that leaned much more on
the idea of propagation rather than spontaneous generation, the idea
that the egg or sperm contained the abilities within to
form new individuals which were able to grow given the
(24:29):
proper circumstances.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Yeah, and this is where we see the noble story
of the humans writ large, because when we're talking about
why spontaneous generation as a theory is not currently accepted
as fact. What we're really doing is exploring the evolution
of how to ask questions scientific inquiry. Today we call
(24:57):
it the scientific method.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
So what's the vast forward? Just a bit more?
Speaker 4 (25:02):
Like you said, been to Francisco Ready, who was a
court physician to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, A fellow
by the name of Ferdinand Medici of the Mediici Medachis.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
You may have heard of.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
He was also a member of the Academy of Experiments
in Florence, Italy. We know, Italy was responsible for this
Enlightenment kind of thinking, you know, which was a flourishing
of just thought that created, you know, some of the
greatest advances in literature, science, philosophy.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
This academy was a big part of that. They'd been
organized by a.
Speaker 4 (25:36):
Group of Galileo Galiles former students, and it was very
much a signpost of this new type of enlightenment thinking.
And Ready was a big conductor of some very very
well thought out and scientifically rigorous etymological studies that he
(26:00):
chronicles in a book called Experiments on the Generation of Insects.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
In this work he.
Speaker 4 (26:07):
Used a very rigorous form of scientific method in order
to conduct his experiments, which today would be looked at
as being pretty modern. And just want to call back
to the source that Ben mentioned earlier, Eastern Illinois University,
the Keep and a paper titled The Fallen Rise of
Spontaneous Generation Theory by Edna Mackie Kniskern.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
And this was, or this, i should say, paved the
way for what we call the scientific method today. So
everybody put your grade school boffen had on and realize, please,
this was bleeding edge science and philosophy. And when you
get to the when you get to the top tier
of science and philosophy, there's a heck of a Venn diagram.
(26:53):
So no, what say we round, Robin? This will give
you the steps. Here's the first one. Let's say, Max,
can we get some like I'm figuring stuff out in
medieval Europe?
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Perfect? All right?
Speaker 2 (27:12):
So that's our you know, yeah, thank you for the loot,
dear Max. Our first step is observation, what there are
flies around meat caucuses at the butcher shop?
Speaker 4 (27:26):
Oh yeah, the old z butcher shop. This is the
first step. You have observed something with thine own eyes,
which then lead to the formation in thy mind palace
of a question. Which is where do the flies come from?
Does rotting needs turn into or produce the flies? Not
(27:48):
going to keep his voice up for the whole round robin,
but I think, yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
And there there are seven steps, is boff and still
the third wood Max, let me get a turn in
the music. The old hypothesis or HYPOTHESI they might have called, right, sure, yeah,
the rotten meat does not turn into flies. It seems
(28:15):
to be only flies can make more flies. And so
we've seen what's happening. We asked ourselves why we said,
maybe we have an answer. How do we test the answer?
Speaker 4 (28:36):
So I guess I've always kind of thought, is the
hypothesis and the prediction is sort of being one and
the same, But here they are kind of listed as
two different steps, which I think makes sense. The hypothesis
is that rotten meat doesn't turn into flies, only flies
can make more flies, like we said, so that leads
us to a prediction that would be the thing that
can be tested. The prediction being if meat cannot turn
(28:56):
into flies, rotting meat in a sealed fly proof he
should not produce flies or maggots.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
And now so we're at four. So now we get
to number five, which is how do we test our hypothesis?
How do we test our prediction? Well, we need a trial, right,
and so what we would do here and I'm not
going to do the voice because I really respect this part.
What we do here is we create two different situations.
(29:28):
If we assume that wide mouthed jars each having a
piece of meat, are you know if we if we
keep those together and we make everything the same, they're
stored in the same place. The only difference is there
is one variable. Our control group will be the jars
(29:50):
of meat without lids. This means the meat is exposed
to whatever whatever is happening in the butchery. And then
our experimental group, the part where we test our hypothesis,
means that we have a couple of jars that are
sealed up tight with lids. And then if we want
to get super cool with it, we have another experimental group.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
We try a middle ground.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Right, we make a permeable or a porous somewhat porous lid.
We just place gauze or cheese cloth. They made it.
They may have called it over there, so that's fine.
We start to test our questions and then we try
to replicate our questions. And then and I know, I know,
(30:35):
I know, I know at least twelve of you, fellow
ridiculous historians are excited about this part. We figure out
the results.
Speaker 4 (30:43):
Yeah, through the study of data sets that are generated
by each of these different groups of experiments, these different trials.
So the what we're looking for, of course, are the
presence or absence of flies and maggots that are related
to each of these different scenarios, whether it be the
open to the air jars, the ones that are air tight,
(31:06):
or the ones with a permeable piece of some kind
of cloth on top. So, in the controlled group of jars,
which would be the wide open ones, flies can be
observed visually entering the jars. Then, given a little bit
of time, one could observe maggots beginning to wriggle around
in there, followed by more flies than in the gauze
(31:29):
covered jars.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
No flies were.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
Seen in the jars, but they are observed hanging around
on the outside because they smell that sweet, sweet funk
of decaying meat.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah, as any slip knot fan knows, right. This leads
us all to our very favorite part conclusions, only flies
can make more flies. We see that as you were
pointing out nol with an aggregation. In comparison of data,
the uncovered jars seem to produce more flies. Our conclusion
(32:05):
being that flies from somewhere else came inside without that
barrier and laid eggs on the meat. Maggots hatch from
those eggs that the flies have made, and they grow
into more adult flies. Only flies can make more flies.
The adult flies lay eggs on the gauze, the porous
(32:26):
border of those jars, and those eggs are small enough
to drop through your cheesecloth or what have you, onto
the meat. But in the sealed jars, none of those
variables can enter, and so you don't see spontaneous generation.
This is the scientific method seven steps. As you said,
(32:49):
we separated them out a bit to be nerdy. We
hope that everybody listening here approves of nerdom.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
I would hope, so gosh, if not, then what are
you doing here? But no, please stay.
Speaker 4 (33:03):
But yeah, this led to a sea change you know,
in public perception of what led to the creation of life,
But it wasn't across the board. This was a massive
shift in the way people thought about the generation of
quote unquote larger organisms you know, and I know flies
(33:24):
are not exactly large, but they're certainly larger than bacterium,
for example.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Bro Flies are pretty much tied you to smaller organism's right, right, Yeah, exactly,
So there was still a lot of thinking while it
had this thinking had been refined through the scientific method
and also, of course, with the.
Speaker 4 (33:43):
Creation of the innovation of the microscope in the sixteen hundreds,
people began to observe all sorts of other, much more
microscopic forms of life, and for a time didn't know
where the hell they were coming from because they could
not observe what had been observed by the naked eye
in this previous experiment with the mean.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
And the foy.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
I saw some gross stuff.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Yeah, so, Noel, can you do us as solid and
name some of these new very small life forms that
were discovered.
Speaker 4 (34:18):
Yeah, yeast, yeasty life forms, fungi, bacteria, like I mentioned, protists,
Oh okay.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
Yeah, I love I love the protests And yeah, It's true.
Speaker 4 (34:31):
Despite the absolute blast forward in scientific thinking and innovation
and observation, there just wasn't yet, even with some of
these new technologies, the ability to really get a hold
on where these.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Things were coming from.
Speaker 4 (34:47):
So spontaneous generation kind of reared its head again with
a lot of people assuming that things like molds and
fungi and what have you actually sprang forth from things
like spoiled food. Spoiled broth, for example, is one that's
mentioned in another great piece of work from Northern Arizona
University that doctor Z found for us.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Pronounced now do you, of course ye, yes, as is known.
This is where we're meeting Jean Baptiste Lamark, who proposed
his own theory of evolution, which was a I would
say it was an attempt to kind of do a
DJ Khalid level remix of scientific thought at the time
(35:30):
to reconcile these various ideas. And he said, if you
he is a predecessor of Darwin. Darwin's great discoveries right
sailing on the Beagle where he ate every animal and
he encountered that is the first shout out to Jack
O'Brien over at Daily Zeitgeist. So our buddy Lamark says, look,
(35:56):
all things strive for perfection, and as they become closer
to perfect new organisms spontaneously arrive to do what corporate
America will call backfill. So if yeah, so if the
you know, let's say a particular small multicellular organism grows
(36:24):
into something larger than a new organism will spontaneously arrive
to keep that lion king circle of life going.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
Ah. So yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (36:35):
And I don't think we mentioned this at the top,
but Aristotle is still relevant to a lot of these newer,
kind of more modern thinkers because while he was a
big proponent of spontaneous generation, Aristotle, there were parts of
his research and thinking that he laid out in various
works that did acknowledge sexual reproduction.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Yeah, of course, yeah, Aristotle was Aristotle was not tyrannical
in thought. Aristotle was kind of his whole deal, right
like that. He was the guy who came in and
way before podcast and propagandists became problematic with this. He
was a good faith asker saying I'm just asking questions,
(37:18):
you know what I mean, like what if this? And
then he would sometimes contradict himself and he would say, well,
also what if this, Either of these things could be true.
I'll tell you what is true. However, this is as
we said, and we always celebrate this a two part episode, correct, oh.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
A preemptive two part episode.
Speaker 4 (37:40):
And you mentioned Jean Baptiste Lamark and his you know,
kind of beginnings of theories of evolution, and he really
was trying to kind of reconcile some of his thinking
with Aristotle's work contained in Scala Nature that he you know,
where he kind of laid out this notion of like
striving for perfection, which is of course a big part
(38:01):
of evolution, the idea of survival of the fittest, about
finding the best form, the best ultimate version of a
thing over time, and then all of the things that
kind of filled in.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
Those spaces underneath.
Speaker 4 (38:15):
So I do think you're right on the money, Ben,
that we wrap up part one of this episode, this
very science science y episode of ridiculous history, and offer
our huge thanks and shout out to doctor Z Research
Associate extraordinaire on this two part journey.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
Yes, doctor Z personal thanks to you, sir, hope you
are doing well. Big big thanks of course, as well
to super producer mister Max Williams our composer Alex Williams,
who has been sending some updates from the road. I
don't know, it might be cool to have Alex back
on the show too.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
He's got one hundred percent.
Speaker 4 (38:53):
She does he's got some some hot takes that Alex
Williams love him dearly.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Big big thanks, of course to our favorite mad scientist,
Jonathan Strickland aka the quizt and obviously Noel, big thanks
to brother Dan soft.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
It gota love, good old bds.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Who else, who else? Who else?
Speaker 4 (39:16):
Oh geez, of course Christoph frasciotis, and he's Jeff COEs
here in spirit, aj Bahamas Jacobs the Puzzler. We already
mentioned our boy the Quizzer. Long may he rain in infamy.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Oh and I'll say something that might be a hot take,
fellow ridiculous historians in academia. Don't want to get you mad,
but big big thanks to everyone throughout history who was
trying to just figure stuff.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
Out doing their best.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
You know, And look, any time you encounter something in
your life that is an invention that you think is cool,
you should also thank the people who came before. They're
a big deal. They got a a lot of stuff wrong,
but they're a big deal.
Speaker 4 (40:02):
Standing on the shoulders of imperfect giants.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
I think it's really the only way to fly.
Speaker 4 (40:06):
And you know, I appreciate you mentioning that, Ben, And
in that spirit, we will see you next time, folks.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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