Gametes and Spores: Ideas about Sexual Reproduction, 1750-1914

by John Farley and Professor John Farley

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801827388
• ISBN13: 9780801827389
• Release Date: October 1982
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 299 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Linnaeus's mistake

By the middle of the 18th century, the great Linneaus thought he understood how flowering plants reproduce. Flowers, he wrote have a male organ, the anther and a female organ the pistil and these are comparable to the corresponding sex organs of animals. Within about a hundred years, a music publisher, Wilhelm Hofmeister showed that Linneaus had been wrong. Using a microsco-pe, Hofmeister reconstructed the reproductive cycles of mosses, ferns, conifers and flowering plants. In each case, he found an alternation of generations in which a sexually reproducing phase produces a stage the reproduces asexually through spores. In flowering plants, for example, the anthers and pistils both produce spores which develop into very diminutive sexually reproducing entities that produce sperm and eggs. John Farley guides us gently through these developments and later ones that led to the discovery of the two modes of cell division, mitosis and meiosis. He also fills us in on the social background, as ideas about human sexuality change in the course of the 19th century. Surprisingly, the Linnaean misconception still retains its grip on the popular mind and even, according to Farley, on the minds of some biologists. This book should help see to it that we all catch up to, at least, a good 19th century grasp of plant reproduction.