WARNING-- Mentions sex. If you're a kid and don't want to know about it or an adult who doesn't want to risk getting caught reading about it, vague as I may be, please leave now.
This one is another idea from the past that I can't help but find terribly amusing. It's basically that, from the moment of conception, humans have all their parts in the right places and just have to make everything bigger. That either the Sperm or the Egg is a tiny human shape that just grows in the mother's womb. This is actually one of the possibilities for where the term Homunculus comes from, since it means 'tiny human' and could refer to the non-living tiny humans that are in egg or sperm. Pop culture has taken that term and turned it into something evil or puppet-like, so that might make things weird, but expelling the evil from the baby after birth would probably explain some of the bio-chemical warfare that is baby diapers, and there are a few other hormonal teen things that could be explained by monthly evils...so this theory might be a bit more possible than I thought...But back to the theory.
In the words of a podcaster that I listened to, this theory sounds like it was put together by someone that has never had sex, and is nerdy enough that they probably never had sex.
One of the reasons that they brought up to support this idea is that eggs hatch with babies that look like they just need to get larger, and everyone knew that babies grow in their mothers, so it was assumed that they started the same shape as they came out. (I keep imagining it as tiny dolls that are waiting for the other half to flip the switch to make them grow, but that feels creepy.)
With today's science, this idea is hilarious to me. With the science they had then, I can kinda understand why they might think that. I find the idea silly, but I know it isn't because they were stupid-- it's because they didn't know as much as we do now. Try to remember that when you read about the past. They made the best guesses they could with the information they had. It just doesn't always age well.
Either way, I hope that made someone laugh. If you want to know more about the theory and when/where it came from, there are links below that can tell you more. If not, maybe bring this up next time you meet up with a friend who has kids or wants them. They might get a laugh out of it too.
Sources:
Arizona State University on Preformation Theory
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