<P> Should be on VfD: It's untrue . First, the "ovum" theory of life is not the rebuttal to the theory of spontaneous generation . It is, instead, the belief that all life originates in a single egg (one). The idea is that that each female has a fully formed microscopic being within her eggs, and each of these microscopic beings who are female have submicroscopic eggs within them containing the next generation, etc . The Ovum theory of life was one view of human generation from the Renaissance to the 18th century . The other, which goes back to the Classical era, was the homunculus theory, a spermatazoic model, where the male sperm contained a tiny human that would go and lodge in an egg to incubate . Both of these theories, however, are entirely independent of the argument about spontaneous generation . </P> <P> Ancients weren't stupid . They knew exactly the connection between mating and breeding, and to think even for a moment that they thought that any higher animal life was spontaneously generated is absurd . The theory of spontaneous generation was fanciful to each generation that believed it, and it was resorted to only when they could not find females or males of a creature or when they could not see any breeding . Thus, they thought that crocodiles, biting flies, and the like, where hatching takes place in the absence of parents and where there is insufficient sexual dimorphism in adults to be apparent, were spontaneous generation candidates . </P> <P> Finally, genetics is very late, and people rejected spontaneous generation long, long, long before microscopes were sufficiently powerful to track genes . I.e. this whole article is someone's misreporting . </P>

Who gave the maxim omme vivum ex ovo