09-05-2025
The goofy, devious, alarming world of big data for anxious parents
About 450 years ago, a French surgeon-barber (two commonly overlapping professions at the time) published an astonishingly incorrect encyclopedic volume, 'On Monsters and Marvels,' to explain why some babies were born with abnormalities. The author, Ambroise Paré, listed five causes. The first four were twinned concepts; the final stood alone. They were: God's glory or God's wrath, too much sperm or too little sperm, and, finally, the imagination. This concept — that the power of maternal imagination can physically imprint on the formation of offspring — dates back to antiquity.
