This article concludes Issue 06. Watch our Behind-the-Scenes interview with the author on YouTube.
By Thomas Moynihan
In 1832, Ferdinand von Ritgen, a German physician, puzzled over how the first generation of humans birthed themselves. He pictured their embryos sprouting spontaneously “without procreating parents preceding them,” like fungal growths emerging from the ground.
By Ritgen’s day, it was understood that life on Earth had predated humanity’s debut for eons and that living creatures had increased in complexity across that duration — but it wasn’t understood how novel forms appeared. A twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin had boarded the HMS Beagle only a year before, his theory of evolution as yet unconceived. Given available knowledge, Ritgen’s conjecture made sense.
A seasoned obstetrician, Ritgen knew firsthand the intricacies and difficulties of childbirth. As there would have been neither mothers nor uteruses to incubate these first fetuses, he reasoned that nature must have provided substitutes. He imagined seedpods sprouting around the fetuses, cupping them like protective wombs. Ritgen claimed these would have resembled the fleshy blossoms of Rafflesia arnoldii, better known as the “stinking corpse lily” because of how it emulates the smell of corporeal decay to attract pollinators.
A detailed illustration of a Rafflesia flower by the Scottish botanist, Robert Brown, who introduced the genus to the scientific world in 1820. Credit: Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Ritgen pictured the “first child awakening in the calyx” of this “gigantic flower,” swimming in the amniotic bliss of its “milky sap.” These “leathery” chalices, he remarked, would have germinated in “Uferschlamm,” the riverside mud. He pointed to countless other organisms that seemed to emerge, without prior parents, from slime: mites, algae, jellyfish, lice, and even intestinal worms. At the time, the idea of gestation without prior procreation had not yet been satisfactorily disproven.
Of course, some weren’t impressed. Theologians decried that by implying we weren’t descended from Adam, Ritgen demoted us to “fungus-people” with a pedigree that was but a nativity of slime. They deemed his idea yet another noxious fruit of scientific “nihilism,” budding alongside all the other godless theories shooting up “like disgusting mushrooms in the pathologically productive soil of our time.”
Ignoring Ritgen’s excusable ignorance of the Darwinian steps that separated slime from simian, his basic sentiment lives on today. Even the eminent Stephen Hawking, appearing on a 1995 BBC documentary about cosmology, voiced the motif before the credits rolled: “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” Hawking delivered this assertion with the vestige of a grin.
For many centuries, misanthropes and humanists alike have indulged in similar comparisons. But this argument has metamorphosed alongside scientific understanding. Where we used to think life was overabundant, we now recognize that it may be staggeringly rare.
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