2. They believe they are right because they have a straw man to attack, i.e., "The mother's blood does not flow through the umbilical cord."

Dr. M. R. DeHaan

 How wonderfully God prepared for the virgin birth of His Son. When He created woman He made her so that no blood would be able to pass from her to her offspring. In order to produce a sinless man who would yet be the son of Adam, God provided a way whereby that man would have a human body derived from Adam but have blood from a separate source.⁽⁴²⁾

 When these Blood Indoctrinators hear that science has proven that blood does not pass from mother to child through the umbilical cord, they claim that science had proven that children do not inherit their blood from their mother.⁽⁴³⁾ Yet, if asked when a child inherits his bodily traits, they say that it is at conception. One of the traits that the child inherits at conception is the nature of his blood. However, the umbilical cord doesn't form until many days after conception, as an extension of the germ layers making up the embryo's body. Therefore, the umbilical cord argument is irrelevant to inheritance. The child has already "inherited his blood" from both of his parents by the time the umbilical cord forms. Even if the Blood Indoctrinators were right, that sin is only in blood, the fact that blood does not flow through the umbilical cord is not sufficient to keep a person from inheriting his mother's blood. The Blood Indoctrinators will need to find a means for Christ's sinless nature other than the non-flow of blood through the umbilical cord.

Doctor DeHaan, in many of his writings, constantly displayed inaccurate ideas that were scientifically naive. This may have been a result of his attempt to combine his old ideas with new scientific knowledge. Regarding human generation, it was believed until the Sixteenth Century that the fetus formed out of his parent's blood. The invention of the microscope enabled people to learn that there is no blood involved in conception. Dr. DeHaan appears to have combined the idea that a child forms from his parent's blood with a fallacy that was common 150 years ago.

During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, there were two theories about the process of conception. Anton van Leeuwenhoek had established in 1677 that sperm from the male enters the female during intercourse. It was unknown what the sperm did. Some thought that it was merely a contaminant, but that belief was weakened by experiments in which the sperm was filtered out of the seminal fluid. Two major, opposing beliefs arose about the sperm and the egg. One group claimed that the sperm contained a "homunculus," a miniature human, which took up residency in the egg.⁽⁴⁴⁾

One investigator even sketched a drawing of the homunculus, based on his observations with a microscope. The Homunculists believed that the egg was an inert structure, a housing waiting for the sperm to occupy it. The egg was analogous to barren-yet-fertile earth, while the sperm was the seed that absorbed nutrition from the earth.

The other group, called Ovists, believed that the egg contained a tiny human, whose growth was triggered by the introduction of sperm. Both of these groups, then, believed in theories of preformation, the belief that the human body is pre-formed and merely grows in size in the womb. Both theories of preformation are quite wrong, but if Dr. DeHaan was a preformationist, it would explain his teachings about the blood and human inheritance of blood.

Doctor DeHaan apparently believed a moderated form of the preformation theory--in fact, that was what was taught in the late Nineteenth Century. It was believed that each organ arose from a specific gene. Due to a sloppiness in terminology, there is a tendency even today to imply that the characteristics of each organ arises from a specific gene. Dr. DeHaan's belief seems to have been that blood comes from a single gene contributed by the male parent. Perhaps he also thought that genes were passed through the blood. However, the egg contains half of the genes required to produce a human body, and it is alive and active. The sperm supplies the other half of the genes needed. It takes several genes to produce each of our tissues. The genes required for the formation of blood are spread across several chromosomes.

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