>>54880812a little historical fun fact about semen is that when microscopes were first invented, and therefore people had no idea what things would look like when they got better, there was actually a very big group of scientists who strongly believed in preformationism. for our purposes, they basically believed sperm were little humans that would eventually just grow into big humans. critics of this were like, ok faggots, so what you're saying right now is that all of the humans on earth were in their father's balls even when he was a tiny sperm, and was in his grandfather's balls, and this goes all the fucking way to adam and eve, where we were just sperm within sperm within sperm within sperm of unimaginable infinitisimality. and the preformationinsts basically just went "yes that's exactly what i believe. and?"
it's not as retarded as it sounds though. stephen jay gould has a whole section of a book about how the preformationist opinion could be argued to be the one that, at the time, more closely followed the scientific method