Talk:Nicolaas Hartsoeker

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Latest comment: 16 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

This image from Wikimedia commons should go on this page: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Preformation.GIF

I'm just not sure how to do that myself. Well, I'll go look at some other pages. Ceramufary (talk) 16:34, 8 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

DoneT R

Homunculus

Latest comment: 7 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

While I do not necessarily doubt the article currently stating that it was not Nicolaas who stated that he would believe in the theory, there is still the issue that the drawing is attributed to him. So how can it then be explained? Did he just make some picture from his imagination? (I mean, obviously he must have done so because he could not have seen anything anyway). The article right now (2017) is not really very... logical in my opinion. Older textbooks would state that the theory of preformation came from Hartsoeker - now the article states that Hartsoeker made use of an earlier theory. In this case, that should be made more clearly IF it is correct. 2A02:8388:1641:4700:BE5F:F4FF:FECD:7CB2 (talk) 19:02, 9 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

Kenneth Hill (ref 4) quotes Joseph Needhams A History of Embryology (Cambridge University Press 1959): "Hartsoeker's drawing ... represented not what he had seen himself, but what he supposed spermatozoa would look like if they could be seen sufficiently clearly." So, yes, he admitted to "make some picture from his imagination", which caught everybody else's imagination since. According to Hill, a young scientist named Plantade alias Delenpatius was the only one who had reported seeing homonculi, and he did that as a practical joke. Apparently not in on the joke, in 1699 Van Leeuwenhoek attacked Delenpatius' drawings as "imaginery" and said he had not seen anything like that in "a hundred" examinations of sperm. Ironically, those drawings were then connected to Leeuwenhoek, and a myth arose that he himself had seen homunculi. Preformationism is at least 70 years older than Hartsoeker's drawing. In 1625, Giuseppe degli Aromatari (1587–1660) may have been the first to use the term, suggesting that an organism could be "preformed" before conception and only had to develop. Feel free to tweak if you think that is not conveyed well enough in the text. Afasmit (talk) 08:55, 10 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

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