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Originally Posted by wolf
At what point was the mechanism of conception actually understood, though? Spermatzoa meets egg and all that.
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If you generalize to semen meets womb,
long before that. The people who thought about things like when the soul enters the body knew that the fetus grows from a blob with no limbs. Aristotle's idea was that they started with a plant soul, eventually got an animal soul, and finally got a human one. Early Christians mostly thought the soul enters at conception, there was that phase I mentioned when it moved to quickening, probably due to a resurgence of interest in Greek philosophers, and then it eventually moved back to conception.