# Recapitulation and Evolution **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [June 3, 2003, 1:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recapitulation-and-evolution/179277 "2003-06-03T01:44:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Major\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b9bd4f/32.png) [@Major\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Major_Kong)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2003, 1:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recapitulation-and-evolution/179277/1 "2003-06-03T01:44:27Z")
Ok have never heard recapitulation used as evidence for evolution. [http://www.pathlights.com/ce\_encyclopedia/17rec01.htm](http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/17rec01.htm) I assume this is something creationists use to attack evolution when scientist don’t even use it as evidence. So what is the story with recapitulation and evolution? ---
**Author:** ![Major\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b9bd4f/32.png) [@Major\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Major_Kong)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2003, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recapitulation-and-evolution/179277/2 "2003-06-03T01:46:17Z")
Sorry for the typos. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2003, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recapitulation-and-evolution/179277/3 "2003-06-03T02:48:28Z")
Not much of a story. Recpaitulation is basically the idea that primitive features are retained in juvenile creatures, such as a tadpoel retaining the gills of fish. It had a lot of support 100 years ago, but is now considered far less credible. It does still hold true in some instances, but there have been shown to be too many exceptions for it to be particulaly useful today. One of the few uses it does get is in the construction of cladistic relationships. A feature found only in a juvenile is still considered to exist withing that clade, but is considered to be primitive. So it’s basically a scientific theory that has been discredited and abandoned in the face of fresh evidence. Nothing new here. ---
**Author:** ![Major\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b9bd4f/32.png) [@Major\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Major_Kong)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2003, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recapitulation-and-evolution/179277/4 "2003-06-03T03:14:40Z")
Blake do you have any links to back up recapitulation has been discredited? I am not calling your statements into question; it is just every page I find through Google in very creationist and not really that scientific. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2003, 3:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recapitulation-and-evolution/179277/5 "2003-06-03T03:29:15Z")
Nah, can’t help you sorry. I do recall that Gould mentioned it as an example of discredited theory in one of his essays, so that might give you a starting point. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2003, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recapitulation-and-evolution/179277/6 "2003-06-03T03:33:21Z")
And having said that I put ‘Gould Recapitualtion’ into Google, and the first site says > [@](#): > > Since the rejection of recapitulationist ideas in the early part of this century, however, the study of links between development and evolution has been relatively neglected. Looks like there are heaps of other non-Creationist sites using that search as well. ---
**Author:** ![Major\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b9bd4f/32.png) [@Major\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Major_Kong)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2003, 3:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recapitulation-and-evolution/179277/7 "2003-06-03T03:56:06Z")
Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2003, 4:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recapitulation-and-evolution/179277/8 "2003-06-03T04:37:09Z")
If you _really_ want to wade through this swamp, find a copy of Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny. (This is _not_ one of Gould’s breezier books.) The primary sticking point regarding recapitulation was the phrase coined from a statement made by Ernst Haeckel, “Ontogeny is the short and rapid recapitulation of phylogeny. . . During its own rapid development. . . an individual repeats the most important changes in form evolved by its ancestors during their long and slow paleontological development.” in his 1866 work, _Generelle Morphologie die Organismen_. From this, the aphorism was coined “Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny.” This “law” was widely embraced by the students of Lamarck, who saw in it the passing of acquired characteristics from one generation to the next. (I am being unfair to actual Lamarckian explanations in the interest of brevity.) While some Darwinists accepted the “law” of recapitulation and attempted to work with it, it was never a serious cornerstone of Darwinian theory. When Mendelian genetics was joined to Darwinian descent with modification, the whole notion of recapitulation became untenable. The reason that recapitulation is no longer accepted lies in the description of what it actually entailed. The notion of recapitulation (especially as embodied in Haeckel’s dictum) was that each earlier stage of an an ancestor creature’s _adult_ form was displayed in the juvenile (or embryonic) form of the modern descendent. Thus, finding gill slits in embryonic humans was supposed to indicate the earlier adult fish form from which humans eventually evolved. However, the gill slits of embryonic humans _do not match_ the gill slits of mature fish. Rather, the gill slits of embryonic humans are homologous to the _embryonic_ gill slits of all vertebrates–including fish, amphibians, and reptiles. This is not recapitulation, but simply the preservation of an earlier form _at the same stage of development_. One reason that Creationists make such a big (and unnecessary) deal about recapitulation (and Haeckel and his fudged drawings) is that, for some reason, Haeckel’s drawings made it into textbooks for decades after his work had been dismissed by the actual biologists studying evolution. I am not sure why Haeckel and his drawings continued in print for so long (aside from the general dumbness of textbooks), but the Creationists have transferred the legitimate criticism of including Haeckel in textbooks to the illegitimate attempt to criticize evolutionary theory based on the errors that appeared in the textbooks.