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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

This always struck me as a bit odd, because it was a somewhat common belief around then, and for long after, that many animals reproduced by abiogenesis anyway. Why bother taking two mice on the ark; everyone knows that mice spontaneously emerge from river mud!

(It’s possible that this was just a Greek quirk and never made it to Palestine, I suppose.)

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Listen, we still don't know how eels reproduce. Our knowledge has never been all inclusive and properly disseminated. The fearful cave-dwelling scribes who wrote the old testament were clearly not up to date on their biology.

I didn't know either, but hn came to the rescue. In case you're one of today's lucky 10000:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/25/where-do-eels-...

I think eels are safely outside the domain of knowledge where anyone could safely say "everybody knows that!"

https://xkcd.com/2501/

Well, no, I’m actually surprised that whoever wrote the Old Testament _was_ up enough on their biology (or at least aligned with biology, however accidentally) to realise that most animals reproduce sexually. This certainly wasn’t the conventional view in the Greek world, say, nor was it in the West until the 18th century or so.

What was this view exactly? They would have know their pets and farm animals reproduced sexually. I guess it isn't a leap to think all mammals? So what animals did they think did not?

So, we tend to think that it’s just common sense that most animals reproduce sexually (actually I think most people would assume that _all_ animals do; in fact, as with most things, there are edge cases), but, well, to an extent that’s because we already know that. The historical view was a bit different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

This isn’t even the only weird idea that people used to have about reproduction; there’s also stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose_myth

Mice, flies, vermin of various kinds that seemed able to show up anywhere from no obvious parents.

We do now!! It’s fascinating. Look it up!

The idea persisted into the Middle Ages. Can't say for certain that it was continuous, however; the medieval supporters quoted Aristotle et al.

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