In history, people believed in something called spontaneous generation, which was the idea that living things could just appear from nonliving stuff. For example, some thought that mice came from moldy grain or that scorpions could be made from bricks and basil! However, we know today that all living things are made up of cells, and cells come from other cells. This understanding tells us how life really works. Just like we learned in BrainPOP, cells are the building blocks of all living things, so instead of magic recipes, it’s all about cells and how they reproduce!
Have you ever wanted to make your own scorpion? Me neither, but scientists used to think it was possible!
According to a 17th-century Dutch scientist named Jean-Baptiste van Helmont, making a scorpion from scratch required two bricks and some basil. Someone would need to scrape a hole in one of the bricks and fill it with basil. Then they would put the second brick on top to make a brick sandwich and put the whole thing in the Sun for three days. According to van Helmont, the oils and fumes released by the basil mixed with the brick would become scorpions. Easy, right?
This scorpion “recipe” may be close to 400 years old, but the idea that living things like scorpions were born directly from nonliving things is much older than van Helmont’s work. This theory, called spontaneous generation, was used to explain the origin of plants and animals for more than 2,000 years!
Let’s take a moment to break down the term “spontaneous generation.” “Spontaneous” means sudden and unplanned. “Generation” refers to the creation or birth of living things. So, the theory of spontaneous generation refers to the idea that living things are born suddenly from nonliving things.
Now for some examples: The Ancient Egyptians believed that eels formed when sunshine reached the muddy bottom of the Nile River. Throughout medieval Europe, farmers thought that mice came from moldy grain. During the black plague, people were convinced that rats were born from sewage and garbage in the streets.
While the idea of spontaneous generation might seem silly now, it made a lot of sense for a very long time. Before the invention of microscopes in the 1600s, humans couldn’t observe the reproduction of hard-to-see organisms. So, spontaneous generation was a pretty reasonable explanation of where plants and animals come from. The idea that mice were born from grain or that eels came from mud matched up well with what people could observe: Mice were found where farmers stored grain and eels slithered through the mud.
Just like our current understanding of where organisms come from, spontaneous generation was a way of knowing. Luckily, new discoveries and evidence allow us to reshape our understanding of the world and the things living in it.
You’re still welcome to try out the scorpion recipe, though, but be careful!
make an observation based off of this but make it based off of the guiding question on the brainpop "what are cells" make it for brainpop and short like a middle schooler wrote it
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