recapitulationistn.adj.

1897 L. C. Miall in Nature 26 Aug. 408/2 If I had time to discuss the Recapitulation Theory, I should begin by granting much that the Recapitulationist demands.

1932 Q. Rev. Biol. 7 96/1 The Haeckelian recapitulationists knew nothing of modern genetics and very little experimental embryology.

1995 Economist 25 Nov. 137/2 Early recapitulationists believed, for instance, that a human embryo began as a fish-like one, metamorphosed into an amphibian-like one, and then turned into a reptilian one, before ultimately becoming mammalian.

2002 S. J. Gould Struct. Evolutionary Theory v. 367 All recapitulationists necessarily defended some form of speeding up for ancestral ontogenies through phyletic time.

1897 Appletons' Pop. Sci. Monthly Oct. 846/1 He [sc. Miall] expressed himself as accepting in great measure, but still in part only, the ‘recapitulationist’ theory, as it had been called, of embryonic development.

1960 Science 22 July 202/1 This recapitulationist outlook..is consistent with that of others.

1973 Systematic Zool. 22 88/2 The recapitulationist argument would postulate that..the condition in the young stage is primitive to that of the adult stage.

2003 L. Moss What Genes can't Do i. 16 Unlike the recapitulationist approach which gained vogue later in the nineteenth century under the rubric of Ernst Haeckel's ‘biogenetic laws’, von Baer's model..did not claim to see the lower adult organism in the embryological pathway of the higher organism.