Buy used £19.95

£2.80 delivery 13 - 15 July. Details

Select delivery location

Used: Very Good | Details

Sold by World of Books Ltd

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Follow the author

Matthew Cobb

The Egg and Sperm Race: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth Mass Market Paperback – 2 April 2007

by Matthew Cobb (Author)

4.3 4 ratings

See all formats and editions

Amazon Price

New from

Used from

Hardcover

"Please retry"

£89.71

—

£89.71

Mass Market Paperback

"Please retry"

£19.95

—

£19.95

Where do we come from? For thousands of years we really had no clue how living things were created -- great thinkers like Aristotle and Plato had attempted to explain what became known as the problem of 'generation', but neither really had the tools or the insight to solve the mystery. The result was a wealth of weird and wonderful ideas about the components necessary to create new life -- blood, 'vapours', strange pulses in the air. It was also widely accepted that animals could breed different species; the notion that two sheep can only make another sheep is a surprisingly modern idea. But all this confusion changed in a flurry of discovery in the mid-seventeenth century. In just a decade, a group of young scientists in Europe established the existence first of the human egg and then of the human sperm. At last, the building blocks were in place -- although, in one of the great ironies of science, it would be another 150 years before someone worked out how fertilisation actually took place. Focusing on the personalities and rivalries of this extraordinary period, Matthew Cobb has shed new light not just on an under-reported story of science but on our very nature -- and how little we still know about one of the greatest miracles of Nature.

Print length

352 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Simon & Schuster UK
Publication date

2 April 2007
Dimensions

19.8 x 0.1 x 12.9 cm
ISBN-10

1416526005
ISBN-13

978-1416526001
See all details

Professor Matthew Cobb
341
Paperback
30 offers from £3.90
Matthew Cobb
201
Paperback
25 offers from £3.09
Professor Matthew Cobb
13
Hardcover
27 offers from £7.18
Matthew Cobb
83
Paperback
23 offers from £1.00
Matthew Cobb
63
Hardcover
14 offers from £1.00
Matthew Cobb
28
Paperback
28 offers from £2.14

Product description

About the Author

MATTHEW COBB is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. He has translated five books from French into English, and spent most of his adult life as a researcher in Paris, before returning to the UK in 2002.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster UK (2 April 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1416526005
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1416526001
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 19.8 x 0.1 x 12.9 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 1,720,373 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 5,402 in History of Science (Books)
- 75,642 in Popular Science
- 247,590 in History (Books)

Customer reviews:
4.3 4 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Matthew Cobb

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

4 global ratings

5 star
4 star
3 star 0% (0%)		0%
2 star 0% (0%)		0%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Shauna

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 13 February 2015

Verified Purchase

Good read, well written and witty

Helpful

Philip Young

Where do we come from?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 1 October 2006

What a splendid book!

Although almost everyone seems to get the hang of the preliminaries, understanding how an act of passion can lead to a new life nine months later is rather a challenge.

Shakespeare for example, might have been good at explaining 'love', but neither he nor any of his contemporaries had a clue about the biological process that brings us into the world. It's not surprising, really - the action happens out of sight and involves bits and pieces that are undetectable without a sophisticated microscopes.

This led respected scientists to some remarkable conclusions. For example, it was held that mice could be generated by putting a dirty shirt and some grains of wheat into a bottle; women were widely thought as able to produce rabbits and kittens as bouncing babies. Leonardo da Vinci drew a detailed anatomical diagram of a couple having sex, but his understanding of their internal wiring seems fanciful.

Then, in the 1660s and 1670s, a colourful group of scientists in Holland, collaborating and bickering by turn, started to make significant breakthroughs.

Matthew Cobb's challenge is to make this story accessible. He needs to give the reader enough science to handle some challenging concepts, fix the key players in a historical context that it as at once familiar and very distant, and also put flesh on the bones of characters for whom there is little hard evidence. For the most part, he handles this with some skill, not least when his own enthusiasms show through (Cobb teaches zoology at the University of Manchester and knows more about fruit flies than most would admit).

Almost every page reveals some astonishing fact, and he is good on highlighting striking details. Eventually the story comes to the point at which one of the scientists comes to the conclusion that "all insects proceed from an egg, that is laid by an insect of the same species." Cobb observes that with this statement Jan Swammerdam propelled the whole of natural history into the moden world. It is quite a claim, but without this understanding it is hard to see key areas of practical or theoretical science developing.

Establishing how these processes occur was still shrouded in mystery, but gradually, through skillful dissection and rigorous observation, the function and operation of various organs began to emerge.

Needless to say, the final impression his story leaves is one of wonder. Most 21st Century readers who smile at the idea of spontaneous generation, who cannot accept that a woman's laid in a damp sunny place will turn into snakes, will still admit to a sense of awe that the bizarre process Swammerdam, de Graaf, Leeuwenhoek and others uncovered really does works. It is where we come from, too.

Highly recommended.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

T. R. Birkhead

Winning with gametes

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 21 September 2007

This is a wonderful, scholarly yet highly readable book. The struggle to discover the existence of sperm and ova and how they fuse to form a new individual makes compelling reading. Cobb does a superb job.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 21 September 2006

I was very impressed to find that a book written about a subject that is really no where near my own academic interest (namely being linguistics) can be written in such an accessible and exciting way.

If you don't read this book you miss out on a great experience.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs	AbeBooks Books, art & collectables	ACX Audiobook Publishing Made Easy	Amazon Web Services Scalable Cloud Computing Services

Audible Download Audiobooks	Book Depository Books With Free Delivery Worldwide	DPReview Digital Photography	Goodreads Book reviews & recommendations

Amazon Home Services Experienced pros Happiness Guarantee	IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities	Kindle Direct Publishing Indie Digital & Print Publishing Made Easy	Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands

Amazon Warehouse Deep Discounts Open-Box Products	Amazon Business Service for business customers	Whole Foods Market We Believe in Real Food

Image Unavailable

Follow the author

The Egg and Sperm Race: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth Mass Market Paperback – 2 April 2007

Popular titles by this author

Product description

About the Author

Product details

About the author

Matthew Cobb

Customer reviews

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.