Did the ancientGreeks believe that the female didn't contribute any genetic material?

[Derleth]

Wasn’t Aristotle the guy who couldn’t count the number of teeth in a woman’s head, or do I have him confused with someone else? (Or is this just another myth?)

Edited to add: 9,000! I wasted my 9,000th post ragging on Aristotle. I almost want to take that moron Plato down a notch or two as well.

[Chronos]

Hey, you try searching yahoo images for sperm man inside and see what you come up with (BTW that search is not at all work safe).

On the other hand, searching for “homunculus sperm” is quite safe, and is in fact how I found that one. But I didn’t see any sideways ones.

[bonzer]

@Derleth

Wasn’t Aristotle the guy who couldn’t count the number of teeth in a woman’s head, or do I have him confused with someone else? (Or is this just another myth?)

That was Aristotle, but - as you suggest - it’s not entirely clearcut. The key passage is in his The History of Animals, Book II, 3:

Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made: but the more teeth they have the more long-lived are they, as a rule, while those are short-lived in proportion that have teeth fewer in number and thinly set.

The obvious point here that contradicts the usual version of the story is that he’s actually implicitly claiming that he has observed this in the cases of “men, sheep, goats and swine”.
Now his whole appeal to observation here may be rhetorical, but one has to wonder whether there’s actually some mundane explanation here that he missed. A difference in diet. A difference in dental hygiene practices. Some selection effect.
Hell, I’ve just tried counting my own teeth with my tongue. I’m an adult Caucasian male with what I think is a full set of teeth - despite having grown up on the west coast of Scotland in an area with a notoriously bad standard of dental health and having received more than my fair share of fillings - but I’m currently not sure whether I’ve got 28 or 29 teeth. Coming up with a standard figure for the number of teeth is perhaps a bit more difficult than it appears at first sight.

There’s the similarly common variant of the story which suggests that he got the number of teeth a horse has wrong. The relevant passage here is from Book VI, 22:

The horse has forty teeth. It sheds its first set of four, two from the upper jaw and two from the lower, when two and a half years old. After a year’s interval, it sheds another set of four in like manner, and another set of four after yet another year’s interval; after arriving at the age of four years and six months it sheds no more. An instance has occurred where a horse shed all his teeth at once, and another instance of a horse shedding all his teeth with his last set of four; but such instances are very rare. It consequently happens that a horse when four and a half years old is in excellent condition for breeding purposes.

Judging by the long Wikipedia article on horse teeth, this is far from obviously wrong, except as an oversimplification of a complicated subject. It even appears that female horses may have fewer teeth than male ones.

[Septima]

@bonzer

Now his whole appeal to observation here may be rhetorical, but one has to wonder whether there’s actually some mundane explanation here that he missed. A difference in diet. A difference in dental hygiene practices. Some selection effect.

I seem to remember an article (no cite, sorry) that claimed that women, unless they were able to eat more while pregnant and nursing (as women in developed countries are urged to do), they would frequently lose teeth as a result. Which is the origin of the old wives tale that “every child costs the mother a tooth”.