Atavism

The term atavism is employed to express the reappearance of characters, physical or psychical, in the individual, or in the race, which are supposed to have been possessed at one time by remote ancestors. ❋ 1840-1916 (1913)

No clear conception as to its true nature had been formulated, and even the propriety of designating the observed phenomena by the term atavism seemed doubtful. ❋ Hugo De Vries (1891)

The origin (perhaps rather the distinction) of species is accounted for principally by the last named law, by means of which Eimer also explains the so-called atavism or reversion. ❋ Eberhard Dennert (N/A)

Lombroso, and the Italian school of criminologists generally, attribute crime chiefly to atavism, that is, reversion to primitive types. ❋ Unknown (1909)

Many instances of so-called atavism are of purely morphologic nature. ❋ Hugo De Vries (1891)

Used in this way, this term has the same bearing as the word atavism of the breeders, but it has the advantage of indicating the true cause thereof. ❋ Hugo De Vries (1891)

It is generally called atavism, or better, systematic atavism, and the clearest cases are those in which a quality which is latent in the greater part of a family or group, becomes manifest in one of its members. ❋ Hugo De Vries (1891)

First of all the question arises as to whether the case is one of real atavism, or is only seemingly so, being due to hybrid or otherwise impure descent of the varying individual, and secondly whether it may be only an instance of the regularly [182] occurring so-called atavism of the sporting varieties with which we shall deal in a later lecture. ❋ Hugo De Vries (1891)

The examples given may suffice to convey a general idea of the phenomenon, ordinarily called atavism by gardeners, and considered mostly to be the effect of some innate tendency to revert to the ancestral form. ❋ Hugo De Vries (1891)

But this process, which is transforming us from savages into civilized men, is a very slow one; and now and then there occur cases of what physiologists call atavism, or reversion to an ancestral type of character. ❋ Unknown (1872)

Any attempt to question historical fact of Armenian Genocide can be characterized as atavism ❋ Unknown (2009)

The more important and best-known phenomena of heredity do not require any such hypothesis, and leading facts (such as atavism, transmission of lost parts, and the general non-transmission of acquired characters) are so adverse to it that Darwin has to concede that many of the reproductive gemmules are atavistic, and that by continuous self-multiplication they may preserve a practical "continuity of germ-substance," as Weismann would term it. ❋ Unknown (N/A)

Those among the representatives of such organizations whose scientific earnestness and personal good faith make it impossible for them to deny outright the existence of oligarchical tendencies in every form of democracy, endeavour to explain these tendencies as the outcome of a kind of atavism in the mentality of the masses, characteristic of the youth of the movement. ❋ Unknown (1916)

De Vries distinguishes this kind of atavism as vicinism (Lat. vicinus, neighbour), and says that it ❋ 1840-1916 (1913)

The appearance of blue eyes in the second generation is the long observed but formerly mysterious "atavism," or reversion to the grandparent. ❋ Eugene Lyman Fisk (1907)