Free On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears by Stephen T. Asma Page A

be
form
that separates one kind of thing from another. Form is the cookie cutter, so to speak, and matter is the dough. When a man and a woman have sex, Aristotle says, the form of the offspring is passed along via the man’s semen. The woman’s uterine blood provides the raw matter upon which the semen information goes to work, concocting and shaping the eventual fetus. The recipe provided from the male would, if it could, create an exact replica of itself, but the clumsy interference of unpredictable matter (too much of this, too little of that) actually corrupts the replication process. So
heredity
is explained by the male contribution to procreation, and
variation
and
diversity
are explained by the female contribution. 23
    In an illuminating passage in
Generation of Animals
, Aristotle gives the ancient world a new view of monsters: “Even he who does not resemble his parents is already in a certain sense a monstrosity.” 24 In other words, where there is deviation from the type (and there always is), one sees the minor errors inherent in reproduction. Everyone is just a little bit monster, in this trivial sense, but a more dramatic deviation (again caused by matter) creates the true “grotesques” of teratology: conjoined twins, craniofacial anomalies, missing limbs, polydactyls, hermaphrodites, and so on. He even offers a mundane scientific suggestion for why we don’t see more human monsters. “Why is it,” he asks, “that quadrupeds of a small size most often give birth to monstrosities; whereas man and the larger quadrupeds such as horses and asses do so less often? Is it because small quadrupeds such as dogs, pigs, goats, and sheep, have more abundant progeny than the larger animals, which either always or usually produce only one offspring at a time?” 25
    Unlike many ancients who loved to speculate on the meaning or purpose of a particular monstrous birth, Aristotle concluded that monsters have no purpose or special meaning. To ascribe such meanings to natural accidents would be as wrongheaded as saying that a crack in the sidewalk is
for the purpose
of letting grass grow through. Monsters are just cases of biological bad luck and therefore don’t require special explanations. Aristotle joins the other scientists in claiming that there is no additional purpose or portent in bizarre ram’s horns (Anaxagoras) or seeming centaurs (Thales).All of Nature, according to Aristotle, should be understood in terms of purpose (teleology), such as when he says that an eye must be explained by its purpose of seeing and an acorn’s purpose is the oak tree. But despite this framework, or rather because of it, there are no special purposes for monsters beyond the usual species-specific goals. A monster born of humans, no matter what it looks like, is a failed attempt to actualize a human essence. It is not a new species or a hybrid species or an alien creature or even a message from the gods. It is just an anomalous or abnormal human being. 26 But Aristotle’s demystification of monsters turned out to be a minority report, largely ignored by the ancient populace. Anomalous births continued to augur important revelations for superstitious Greeks and Romans.
PHANTOM IMAGES
     
    If the ancient scientists were right in their general skepticism about monsters, was everyone else just stupid and naïve? Lucretius offers a charitable clarification of why people continued to believe in monsters. The reason, which seems paradoxical at first, is that people continued to
see
monsters. But now Lucretius, following the general atomistic theory, redefined this “seeing” of monsters within an overall paradigm of perception.
    According to atomists, all physical objects are constantly shedding gossamer-thin films of themselves, phantom images that emanate off the object. A horse, for example, is always emitting a transparent copy of itself, fluid-like, through the medium of air until it reaches my eye. I take in this representation