Recapitulation Theory - Origins

Origins

The earliest recorded trace of a recapitulation theory is from the Egyptian Pharaoh Psamtik I (664 – 610 BCE), who used it as an hypothesis on the origin of language. The concept of recapitulation was first formulated outside of the field of biology. It was a widely held idea among traditional theories of the origin of language (glottology), assumed as a premise that children's use of language gives insights on its origin and evolution.

The idea was reprised in 1720 by Giambattista Vico, in his highly influential Scienza Nuova. The idea was first formulated into the field of biology in the 1790s among the German Natural philosophers, after which, Marcel Danesi states, it soon gained the status of a biogenetic law.

The first formal formulation was proposed by Étienne Serres in 1824–26 as what became known as the "Meckel-Serres Law", it attempted to provide a link between comparative embryology and a "pattern of unification" in the organic world. It was supported by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and became a prominent part of his ideas which suggested that past transformations of life could have had environmental causes working on the embryo, rather than on the adult as in Lamarckism. These naturalistic ideas led to disagreements with Georges Cuvier. It was widely supported in the Edinburgh and London schools of higher anatomy around 1830, notably by Robert Edmond Grant, but was opposed by Karl Ernst von Baer's ideas of divergence, and attacked by Richard Owen in the 1830s.

Read more about this topic:  Recapitulation Theory

Famous quotes containing the word origins:

    Grown onto every inch of plate, except
    Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
    Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
    Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
    The origins of art.
    Howard Moss (b. 1922)

    The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.
    Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)

    Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.
    W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)