2017-10-01 Sanctuary Asia

The

Sanctuary

Pa per s

Bowhead whales are one of the longest-living mammals on Earth, and also one of the heaviest,

second only to the blue whale.

Text By Purva Variyar

More at http://www.sanctuaryasia.com | Natural History

Preformationists believed that a mini-human

resided in the head of a sperm, and this

developed into future progeny. A sketch (left) as

drawn by Nicolas Hartsoekar in 1695.

The astounding diversity of life forms in the world

reveals something new each day. And more often than not,

every other new discovery involves an amphibian! Scientist

Ramesh Aggarwal and his team at the Center for Cellular

and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, India, have

discovered a new species of purple frog in the Western

Ghats, Nasikabatrachus bhupathi or the Bhupathy’s purple

frog, named after the scientist, Dr. Subramaniam Bhupathy.

This pig-faced beauty (not an oxymoron!) resembles and

is closely related to Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis, a

purple frog also known as the pig-nosed frog, discovered

in the Western Ghats in 2003. The two species differ in

anatomy and calls. “We confi rmed it was a different species

when we bar-coded its DNA, which was genetically very

different from the purple frog,” Aggarwal told The Hindu.

These frogs are known to spend their entire adult lives

underground in moist soil, surfacing only for a couple

of weeks every monsoon to mate! More interestingly,

the tadpoles of the Bhupathy’s purple frog have

specially-adapted mouths with tiny teeth that help them

feed like suckerfi sh on algae, on the rocks behind waterfalls

to which they latch on. The existence of Nasikabatrachus

also strengthens the argument that the Indian landmass was

once linked to Madagascar and Seychelles as the closest

relatives of this frog species inhabit Seychelles!

The Mini-human Theory Pig-nosed Cousin Discovered

Did You Know?

When human imagination takes fl ight, imagined reality

becomes the order of the day. What better example to

illustrate this than the misplaced theory of preformation or the

mini-human-in-sperm theory! Laid down and fi ercely accepted

as a rational explanation for how one human being gives rise to

another in the 17th and 18th centuries, preformationism explained

that sperm in a male carried a preformed, mini, shrunken

human or the ‘homunculus’, which when transferred into the

female’s womb through the act of

coitus slowly started to infl ate and

enlarge into a normal-sized human

baby. So, basically, it dismissed the

idea of any information or coded

instructions being passed on from

the parents to the fetus, in other words

• the essence of heredity, and instead
  claimed that it was simply miniaturisation
  that was the principle behind reproduction. By
  this logic, every homunculus would in turn have its
  own mini-human encased inside it, and then another one
  inside it and so on...all the way to the fi rst man. Imagine
  Russian dolls and you will get the picture, only here the
  number of dolls would be infi nite! So entrenched was this
  idea among the people at the time that Nicolas Hartsoekar,
  a scientist, claimed to have seen a mini-human, compactly
  packaged in a fetal position within the head of a sperm, through
  a microscope! Oh ‘man’!

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