Where Babies Come From

It's more complicated than you may think.

Nobody remembers Thomas Hooper Cooper for his contributions to nineteenth-century economics. He was born in 1861 to Anglican missionary parents — although he might have disputed this — in the jungles of Unghzaland in northeastern India, where he spent almost his entire life. From his missionary’s hut, he solved some of the simpler and less important mathematical problems in the economics of wages. He sent his findings to London in slightly damp envelopes, where they were duly published by the Royal Society for Political Economy. Occasionally, reviewers found it strange that Hooper Cooper was so interested in the mechanics of the labor market, given that he lived among people who ploughed the land, grew crops, and made pottery without any system of wages whatsoever, and whose ceremonial currency was the severed heads of enemy tribesmen. But there were eccentrics everywhere. In 1894, the Society invited him to write a book, assuming — correctly — that he’d do it without remembering to ask for any pay. The book was published two years later as Another Theory of Wages. He was too late: by the time it came out in London, his ideas had already been rendered completely obsolete by marginal revenue productivity theory. The story goes that Thomas Hooper Cooper was so upset by the book’s failure that he immediately died four years later from malaria.

Today, Another Theory of Wages is mostly remembered for a single footnote. In the sixth chapter, on labor market elasticity, Cooper comments: “This self-same principle suffices to explain the so-called problem of the increase in the population. During periods of sustained wage growth there must be a concomitant expansion in the labor market to restore equilibrium; thus, individuals are called forth into being. Purely economic factors are entirely adequate to account for human ontogenesis: all competing theories are not only obscene but unnecessary.” Hooper Cooper was a noncongenerist: he believed that people are made out of something other than sex. He had come into the world — maybe falling from the sky, or out of a tree, or crawling out the mud, white and gasping — because of an increased demand for mediocre economic theorists in the humid fringes of the British Empire. It’s not clear what he thought his parents had to do with the process. We also don’t know if he ever tried to explain his ideas to the Unghza or how they replied.

The reason to begin with Cooper is that Another Theory of Wages marks the last time anyone seriously defended noncongenerism in any mainstream western publication. Today, the question of where babies come from is settled, with the overwhelming consensus in favor of congenerism. But while Thomas Hooper Cooper might have been the last noncongenerist to put his ideas in writing, he wasn’t the only one, even in his own era. Not all noncongenerist interpretations have been as austere as his. Hooper Cooper was an outright sex denialist; on the opposite end of the scale is his contemporary Bottaio de Cerchi, the great soldier, statesman, and seducer, who led a revolutionary army against the Austrians during the Risorgimento, and claimed to have slept with two hundred women from a hundred noble houses. According to his biographers, de Cerchi was frequently heard doubting that all people could be produced by something as frivolous as his favourite activity. He had an elderly servant called Cazzuolo, a stern, dignified man with a long, thick, white moustache and two equally thick tufts of hair coming out of his ears. Sometimes he’d point out Cazzuolo to his guests: “Surely you don’t mean to tell me, signor, that a man like this could have come about from the wet movements of youth? Tell me — how could any young, fresh-faced woman with slender hips and little apples for breasts have given birth to such a very old man?” Despite his fondness for sex, de Cerchi refused to believe he’d arrived that way either. His preferred interpretation was that he was a golden statue that had magically come to life.

By the nineteenth century, all noncongenerists were some kind of weirdo; it’s very easy to forget that, for a very long time, various forms of congenerism and noncongenerism were equally respectable positions and that the case for congenerism was not necessarily obvious. In fact, sometimes, it wasn’t even meaningfully distinct from theories that we now consider to be its total opposite. In his 1643 book Of the Origines of Sundry Thinges Botanickall, Geologickall, and Metaphysickall, the barely remembered arranger of other people’s ideas Samuel Salte lays out the various intellectual factions involved in the debate. First, there’s “Seminalism,” which holds that “all thinges grow from Seeds, as Actual Being proceedeth from Potentialitie, and that Man beginneth as a Seed, or Germinatory Plasm, which upon being planted in the vas muliebre cometh to swelle into his right proportions, while taking suche Infusion from Woman as any Vegetable may gain from the compositione of the Soil.”

Opposing the seminalists are the ovists, for whom ‘all thinges hatch from Egges, being already contain’d within.’ Salte divides ovists into ‘Masculine Ovistes’ and ‘Feminine Ovistes.’ The masculine ovists believe that semen is an eggy substance. Somewhere in its albumen, you’ll find the tiny dot of a homunculus, a fully-formed human too small to be seen with the naked eye. Somewhere in its body, each male homunculus has its own little store of even tinier homunculi. The feminine ovists, meanwhile, point out that usually, males do not lay eggs. If we all hatch from eggs, those eggs are obviously contained in the bodies of women, while semen is a ‘Quickening Liquor’ that brings the little person inside to life. They argue that their position is supported by the fact that women, unlike men, become infertile in later life, and also by the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, but Salte has nothing kind to say about the idea. Maybe because feminine ovism edges a little close to something called ‘Nihilic Ovism,’ which discards the quickening liquor and rejects the idea that there’s any necessary link between sex and procreation at all. Sex is just a way to keep men busy, or to keep them attached to women, while she swells with her own secret, self-generating life. Semen is useless slime. The father has no relation to the son. Every king is illegitimate. Nihilism is, obviously, illegal: the books are burned, and sometimes the authors too.

As far as Salte is concerned, the same thing should happen to the last group, which he calls the “Abalabistes, or Congeneristes.” These are the people who believe that humans come from the combination of various pre-existing elements, including “such sundry Meanes as generation from Vapoures, or by the Sun on the Earth and Waters: that one might be form’d from Dough, another by the confluences of Insectes, or the Essences of Man and Woman roughly mix’d during Consummation, or by beseechments to Idoles, or Herbes stew’d in a Pot, and all manner of such evil Superstition as emergeth out of Pagan chaos to insulte the Christian Reasonne with the Lie that Man be two thinges made One.”

Salte’s list is not exhaustive. In many times and places, it’s been assumed that people start as something else: animals, plants, geographic features, sometimes stars. Various tribal peoples have rejected the sexual explanation and enforced the belief that children grow on trees, or underground like tubers. In medieval Gascony, one of the ways a child could enter the world was by wandering into its parents’ house in the form of a small animal — a kitten, a puppy, a lamb — being fed a spoonful of cream, and turning into a baby during the night. It was assumed that a child that had originally been a puppy would remain doglike as he grew up, a calf-child would be dim but obstinate, a mouse-child would be a thief, and so on. In some villages, no one who had emerged as a cat was allowed to become a magistrate or a priest. In the Balkan highlands, children were assumed, well into the early twentieth century, to be born out of the splutterings of mountain streams, and their surnames usually reflected the rivers that had spat them out rather than the parents that raised them.

On the other hand, people have sometimes decided that the question of where babies come from is unsolvable, or has no answer at all. Human beings create themselves, or simply pop into existence from nothing. The Nastiyana school of Buddhism maintains that no one has ever been born, since the self is already an illusion, and it would be meaningless for something that doesn’t exist to come into existence. You only exist in this present moment, the one that’s always already over; you didn’t come from anywhere else. Meanwhile, among the famously individualistic Mespe people of what is now southern California, everyone has always existed. Your perception of yourself has no firm beginning in time, and how could anyone else know more about you than you do? In Mespe society, it was a mortal insult to refer to a time before someone was born, or to say you remember them from when they were a baby. Unlike their neighbours, the Mespe had no tradition of ancestor-worship, but during the early stage of contact with European settlers, they traded large quantities of brass and silver mirrors. Each house was attached to a glittering shrine where the Mespe worshipped themselves.

Within the western tradition, though, most positions have fallen within Salte’s taxonomy of seminalism, ovism, and congenerism. These are not always mutually contradictory; most of the time, people have believed all three at once. A typical Roman paterfamiliascould declare, like one Petrosido in the mid-second century, that “I have three sons: one adopted, one born to my wife, and one I created myself on a whim.” Sometimes Roman noblemen would try to build a political mystique on the idea that they had been born from fire or as a bear-cub. The third-century warlord Antagonis claims to have walked out of a large boulder as a fully-formed adult, “because I was bored.”

It was only around the dawn of the Middle Ages that distinct and contradictory theories truly emerged. St. Augustine of Hippo was an early and dogmatic seminalist. In his account of creation, God had planted the world with rationes seminales, or seminal reasons: small, tightly-bound concepts that would then, like seeds, burst into various forms. All actual things are just expressions of the potential latent in these nonphysical ideas. So God created the idea of speed, and it unfolded into shooting stars and swooping hawks and deer leaping through the woods. He created a world in bud for the pleasure of watching it bloom. Meanwhile, St. Septemberus, Bishop of Elephantine, was one of the first to codify the doctrine of ovism. When the Bible says that God created all the birds and fishes on the fifth day of creation, it means exactly what it says: that he created all of them. Everything that will ever exist is already here — now — just very small. Septemberus believed that when God created Adam, he had also created an almost infinitely small St. Septemberus, asleep inside Adam’s body.

The seminalist-ovist distinction became the major intellectual divide of the Middle Ages; the question of where babies come from ended up encompassing everything, from metaphysics (seminalists lived in a tensile world, all potential, while ovists, for whom everything already existed denied motion, generation, and free will), to aesthetics (seminalists said painting was superior to sculpture, and music was superior to both, while ovists said only nature was truly beautiful), to — inevitably — politics (seminalists supported the temporal power of the Pope, while ovists sided with the Holy Roman Emperor.) Pitched battles occurred between students at the Universities of Paris and Bologna with hundreds dead. Sometimes there was open warfare, with pike and crossbow, between the people who thought everything grew from seeds and the people who thought everything hatched from eggs.

Along the way, some heretical seminalist sects developed the idea that God was nothing more than the first seed, one that contained the idea of germination and becoming itself, and which had unfurled into flowers and wheat and the male reproductive organ. If contemporary accounts are to be believed, they took over churches and replaced the crucifix with an enormous wooden phallus, which they worshipped as the true incarnation of God. They started wearing clothes with big holes around the crotch. It took two brutal wars of extermination before the heresy was wiped out, along with one third of the population of Romagna. Ovists had a heretical movement of their own, these days known as the Protestant Reformation. But while seminalists were content to worship their own penises, the ovists started dedicating themselves to the study of optics. As the fourteenth-century ovist theologian Ovello de l’Ull explained: because everything already exists in miniature, if you can magnify an object, you can see what it will become. This applied to ordinary seeds — de l’Ull claimed to have stared at a walnut for twelve hours until he could discern thousands of walnut trees arrayed in a huge forest along its crinkles — but the principle went deeper than that. As he wrote, “had Caesar a keener vision for the miniature, he might have seen the conspiracy against his life, the knives in the dark, and blood running across the floor of the Senate, engraved in the leaves of his laurel crown. Indeed, if he had carefully examined a mote of masonry dust with superhuman eyes, he might have seen the splendid city of Paris as it now stands, with its tall churches and mighty battlements, asleep and unhatched within its surface.” But while Caesar might not have had superhuman eyes, after a few generations of thankless lens-grinding, the ovists did.

The first true compound microscope was invented in 1612 by Geertruyt in een Haast, a particularly intense nihilic ovist (the Dutch were more tolerant of that sort of thing) who had set out to prove the theory by bearing children while remaining celibate her entire life. Every night before sleep, in een Haast would lie in bed for an hour focusing on the life within her body, the teeming nations, unfounded empires, entire unborn races, all crowding inside the dark cavern of herself. She would enter a kind of trance, commanding that life to ripen and hatch. Sometimes she would gently massage the region of her womb during these trances, and a few times she reported experiencing a “glorious spasm” that made her certain that she’d just conceived, but the child kept refusing to grow. In the meantime, she worked on her lenses. In een Haast never told anyone about her invention — since the microscope was a device for accurately seeing into the future, anyone who had it would have access to near-limitless power — but she did note some of her observations down. In a thimbleful of Utrecht canal water, she observed “a splendid fleet of ships with broad sails and many guns, but they were empty. When I blew softly on the water, they drifted feebly in the wind.” Based on their size and the observed rate of growth, in een Haast calculated that a Spanish fleet would arrive to bombard Utrecht once the Twelve Years’ Truce expired in 1621. She inspected the folds of some lace, and saw huge three-tiered chariots racing along the lines of thread, pulled by immense sweating horses. Eventually, curiosity won out, and, like all true scientists, Geertruyt in een Haast examined her own shit. Her microscope revealed it to be full of snakes, white serpents darting and coiling in the muck. That one confused her. She never worked out exactly what it meant.

In part because of her self-imposed celibacy, in een Haast never got to test out her invention on semen and discover if it really did contain tiny men, tiny seeds, a generative plasm, or a quickening liquor. It took several decades until the microscope was in general circulation and several more until they were powerful enough to see anything clearly. At first, ovists were deeply excited by the small swimming men they discerned floating about in semen, and then horrified when those men turned out to be a mass of millions upon millions of blind, seething monsters. The seminalists were not much happier — it did not make sense. There should be a single, neat, life-bearing substance, not this nightmare of tadpoles. It was horrible to imagine that these disgusting things could turn into rational human beings — especially because all but one of the seminal creatures would inevitably have to die. God could not create such a horrendous waste. Some theorists, including Athanasius Kircher, decided these were clouds of demons, transmitting sin from one generation to the next. All factions concluded that wherever babies came from, it had nothing to do with male or female bodies, or any of their disgusting fluids. Fifteen hundred years after Augustine and Septemberus, the split finally healed, with the mutual destruction of both positions. Everyone defaulted to congenerism as the last remaining choice.

But what kind of congenerism? One of the more interesting options was sentimental congenerism, or thymogenesis. The principle was an old one, first proposed by Polythelos and other Paraplatonists: that because the essence of a human being is Mind, and Body is only a contingent property, new people can only be produced by mental rather than physical events. This idea never really caught on in Europe, but it became the dominant view among Islamic philosophers. In his eleventh-century Al-Nashiha lil-Husul Ala Warith wa-Kitab Asma al-Atfal, a handbook on conjugal technique, the great polymath Mashir al-Saghir explains that babies don’t come from sex, but from love. Or, at the very least, lust. Pregnancy occurs when a man and a woman share an intense emotional experience at the same time, and any sufficiently intense emotion will burst the bounds of the individual subject, forming an entirely new person. Sex is just the easiest way for two people to achieve this, which is why al-Saghir devotes the bulk of the Nashiha to the art of simultaneous orgasm, with illustrations. At the end, he points out that children made of sex will inevitably grow up to be lustful, pleasure-seeking, intemperate, and obese. The reason the world is so sinful is that almost everyone in it was conceived sexually, to the extent that some uneducated people think sexual reproduction is the entire point of human existence. Al-Saghir concludes by commending the “lofty path to securing an heir,” in which husband and wife go to opposite sides of their house, and simultaneously bend their foreheads to the ground in sincere and fervent prayer.

There are very few people in the world made of prayer, and every single one of them has grown up to become a wali. Aside from lust, the most common anthropogenic emotion is rage. Al-Saghir notes that couples who fight all the time seem to have the most children, and these children seem to be constantly angry themselves. Imagine having a bitter row with your spouse, and it never ends but rather, takes on human form, with tiny furious arms and legs and a constantly screaming mouth, and then one day, the argument you had about money or the dishes more than a decade ago is complaining about you to its friends at school. A common trope in medieval Arabic romances is the tragic prince — usually Alexander the Great — conceived in the moment of catastrophic fury when his mother picks up a dagger and plunges it into his father’s heart. The prince grows up to be a powerful, undefeated warrior, but eventually he’s undone when he discovers that he is his father’s murder, made flesh.

There are some sunnier stories. Nasruddin was supposed to have been an incredibly funny joke, which took human form after being told to a young couple; in the more mystical versions it was a joke about Nasruddin himself. The Persian poet Mozaham Zardalu once composed a ghazal so heartfelt that when he recited it at the court of Ghazan Khan, thirty servant-girls immediately became pregnant: one for each line in the poem. The ghazal became thirty famously beautiful and inseparable women with a habit of finishing each other’s sentences, who refused any suitors who wouldn’t agree to marry all thirty of them at the same time. According to al-Saghir, he himself had been conceived when his parents played a particularly hard-fought game of chess.

In the end, sentimental congenerism did not end up having the same long-standing influence in Europe. Both Kant and Leibniz flirted with thymogenesis, but both were also lifelong bachelors who may well have died virgins. The rest of the intellectual establishment ended up deciding that sentimental congenerism couldn’t possibly be true because it would involve paying far too much attention to their wives. No new theory arrived to replace it: instead, it became deeply impolite to talk about the question at all. Through much of the nineteenth century, industrial societies joined Nastiyana Buddhism and the Mespe in putting up a taboo around human origins. Maybe we needed a century or two to acclimatize to what we’d seen under the microscope; while the Victorians were fastidiously putting little skirts around their table legs, a few dedicated weirdos toiling away in brisk, well-lit German universities were establishing the basis for what would become zygotic congeneralism: the theory that babies are formed by the combination of a seed and an egg. When the theory burst into popular understanding in the late nineteenth century, everyone could insist that they’d known all along, but didn’t want to be impolite. The change came fast, and there were only a few stragglers like Thomas Hooper Cooper, out in the wilderness, who didn’t get the news.

In fact, though, noncongeneralism persisted well into the twentieth century; it just wasn’t being published by the Royal Society. Even today, there are parts of the world where babies are distributed by the Generalissimo or given away free as part of a mobile phone deal. In China, the 1949 revolution was followed by a campaign of mass education that included teaching rural villagers about where children came from, but if any of those villagers had repeated the same ideas two decades later, during the Cultural Revolution, they might have been subject to brutal self-criticism sessions. As the Beijing Review explained in 1971, “cadres of the Party are widely disseminating the concept of ‘one divides into two.’ This scientific thesis of Chairman Mao is the foundation of all dialectical thought, and a sharp weapon for the proletariat and all revolutionary people. This concept is despised by class enemies, such as the traitor and capitalist roader Yang Xianzheng, who has attempted to poison the people with the revisionist doctrine of ‘two combine into one.’ The great mass of workers, peasants and soldiers unite to criticize all worthless concepts and defeat them with dialectical logic!” At stake was Yang Xianzheng’s particular interpretation of Hegel, but in the fervor, anything that sounded remotely like synthesis could come with a death penalty. Two parents producing one child was a very dangerous idea. Some cadres tried proposing a revolutionary seminalism, but when the truth kept on changing, it was safer to sit out the entire question. When Gu Shouzhi, a party official in Henan province, was asked flat-out where babies came from, he replied: “Who cares? What matters is not where they came from, but where they’re going: to the countryside, to learn from the people how to struggle for the eternal leadership of Chairman Mao.”

In the west, conservative intellectuals kept worrying that a similar breakout of enforced noncongeneralism was on its way, but it never really arrived. The West Riding Lesbian Collective did promote a feminist ovism; in a six-page pamphlet titled Who Needs Men?, they declared that a woman could conceive children entirely by herself. “Oppressors have always claimed that, unless they could dominate and brutalize our bodies, nothing would ever be accomplished, but somehow all the real work has always been done by the oppressed.” Jacques Derrida’s critics accused him of being an ovist too, which he denied — sort of. “What interests me about eggs,” he said, “is not the egg as origin, the thought that the existence of things can be explained by reference to the egg, but the egg — if indeed we can speak of an egg — as a series of infinite deferrals of origin, already containing in an absent presence all that it originates. But how can I speak of eggs when, in order to arrive, to be heard, first my speech must be, from its very origin, already hatched, that is, it must already have erased the egg of its originless origin?”

This made a lot of people very upset, but then some of these same people will have taught noncongeneralist theories to their children. Babies develop in a gelatinous sac underwater, and the stork comes and delivers it to the nice families in their homes … It’s frustrating, being a child. There is a great secret in the world. You exist: you have opened your eyes on the bright world. Why? Who put you here? The secret has something to do with the daytime, the flowers, the bright feathers of the birds, and the hot penetrating rays of the sun, and it has something to do with the night as well, the things that happen in the dark. You know the secret exists, because there is something very important that no one will tell you. Instead, they try to fob you off with some story about a stork. As Freud points out in his essay On the Sexual Theories of Children, kids simply do not buy the stork theory. In fact, while they don’t realize it, they already know the truth. As soon as the little boy starts really thinking about the secret, Freud writes, “obscure impulses are roused, which the child does not know how to account for — to do something violent, to press in, to knock to pieces, to burst open a hole somewhere.” His search for the hidden secret is part of that impulse: a surging into the dark and hidden places. The quest and its object are the same thing. The precise details can come later — he knows.

But it’s also frustrating to know. There is a great secret in the world. It’s the reason you exist, the reason everyone exists; it determines most of your actions and dominates most of your life, it’s why you wear the clothes you wear and work the job you hate, but in the end it’s a stupid, meaningless secret. You move your hips back and forth, and then a few hours after it’s done you want to do it again. That’s it. Dogs do it. Rats, too. It might be enough for you, but there will always be people who try to find a bigger, deeper, more meaningful secret in the world. Scientists and mystics: those who are strange. Maybe it’s in the stars. But Freud discovered the trap that’s waiting for them.

Every search for hidden knowledge — including, in the end, psychoanalysis itself — is, at root, an attempt to find out where babies come from, and that attempt is always fundamentally erotic in nature. The desire for knowledge is only a very minor species of desire. You can run from what you know, and end up in some very strange places, but you will never escape: the thing you’re running from is the same thing that got you here. They all knew; everyone has always known: the West Riding Lesbian Collective, and Gu Shouzhi, and Mozaham Zardalu, and Mashir al-Saghir, and Polythelos, and Geertruyt in een Haast, and Ovello de l’Ull, and St. Septembrus, and Antagonis, and Petrosido, and the Mespe, and the Nastiyana Buddhists, and Samuel Salte, and Bottaio de Cerchi, and Thomas Hooper Cooper, too, who at six years old, woke up in the night with the monkeys whooping in the trees, the insects fizzing in the dirt, and all of nature seething against itself in the moonless hills of Unghzaland, and hesitated barefoot at the door of his parents’ hut, where through a gap in the banana-leaf fronds, he could see a shoulder moving, amber, paraffin-lit, heaving softly to some soft shallow sound, and at once, in that movement, he saw who loosed Leviathan and laid the foundations of the earth.