"Atavism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... become typical strawberry plants. In the case of the progressive evolution of a species, the developmental potentiality of B becomes of a higher and higher order. In retrogressive evolution, the contrary would be the case. The phenomena of atavism seem to show that retrogressive evolution that is, the return of a species to one or other of its earlier forms, is a possibility to be reckoned with. The simplification of structure, which is so common in the parasitic members ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... for a great deal, for the milk in a woman's veins sweetens, or at least, dilutes an acrid doctrine, as the blood of the motherly cow softens the virulence of small-pox, so that its mark survives only as the seal of immunity. Another would plead atavism, and say he got his religious instincts from his great-grandfather, as some do their complexion or their temper. Others would be compelled to confess that the belief of a wife or a sister had displaced that ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... know them, are, firstly, circumstances hostile to the particular character in question; secondly, conditions of life incessantly inducing fresh variability; and lastly, the crossing of distinct varieties during some previous generation, together with reversion or atavism—that is, the tendency in the child to resemble its grand-parents or more remote ancestors instead of its immediate parents. This latter subject will be fully discussed ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... belong to the same two forms as their parents; but that a few seedlings belonging to the third form occasionally make their appearance; and this latter fact, as Hildebrand remarks, may be attributed to atavism, as some of their progenitors will almost certainly have ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... facts of comparative anatomy, atavism, and the rudimentary organs, was pointed out by Darwin in the first part of his classic work, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).[140] In the "General summary and conclusion" (chap. ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
|
