Spontaneous Generation

David Katzman

11/9/08

Period 4

Spontaneous Generation

Spontaneous Generation is the belief that animals can come from inanimate objects. This theory has been in existence for over 2000 years. It was first believed in fourth century BC. Many people believed in Spontaneous Generation because people noticed things like meat in the butcher shop had flies buzzing around it. They thought that since the flies were not there the day before, that the rotting meat had transformed into flies. In those days before refrigeration, this observation was common. People believed things they saw often and with their own eyes. Since other people saw the same thing and talked about it this strengthened the belief in Spontaneous Generation.

Imagining myself as a doctor in the 1600’s, I would think Spontaneous Generation is crazy talk that needs to be proven before I believe in it. I might even try to prove or disprove it myself. I already have an experiment in mind. In the experiment I would buy some rotting meat. Then I would put some meat in a sealed glass container and just hang another piece outside my window. Over the next few days I would have teams of two people each, watching either the meat in the container or the meat just left out. The people would have two-hour shifts each. After two days of this everyone would share their results: the people watching the sealed meat would not find flies, but the other group would probably observe flies gathering over the meat. Everyone would realize that flies are attracted to rotting meat. Flies could not reach the meat that was kept in a sealed container.

If I was a doctor in the 1700’s and the microscope had recently been invented, I would want to use it to disprove Spontaneous Generation. In my experiment I would look at fly cells under the microscope