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atavism

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The reappearance of a characteristic in an organism after several generations of absence.
  • noun An individual or a part that exhibits atavism.
  • noun The return of a trait or recurrence of previous behavior after a period of absence.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In biology, reversion, through the influence of heredity, to ancestral characters; resemblance exhibited by a given organism to some remote ancestor; the return to an early or original type by its modified descendants; restoration of structural characters which have been lost or obscured.
  • noun In pathology, the recurrence of any peculiarity or disease of an ancestor in remote generations.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The recurrence, or a tendency to a recurrence, of the original type of a species in the progeny of its varieties; resemblance to remote rather than to near ancestors; reversion to the original form.
  • noun (Biol.) The recurrence of any peculiarity or disease of an ancestor in a subsequent generation, after an intermission for a generation or two.
  • noun recurrence of or reversion to a past style, outlook, approach, or manner.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The reappearance of an ancestral characteristic in an organism after several generations of absence.
  • noun The recurrence or reversion to a past behaviour, method, characteristic or style after a long period of absence.
  • noun sociology Reversion to past primitive behavior, especially violence.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a reappearance of an earlier characteristic

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French atavisme, from Latin atavus, ancestor : atta, father + avus, grandfather; see awo- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French atavisme.

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Examples

  • 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.

    The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 2: Assizes-Browne 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.

    Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation 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.

    At the Deathbed of Darwinism A Series of Papers Eberhard Dennert

  • Lombroso, and the Italian school of criminologists generally, attribute crime chiefly to atavism, that is, reversion to primitive types.

    Sociology and Modern Social Problems 1909

  • Many instances of so-called atavism are of purely morphologic nature.

    Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation 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.

    Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation 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.

    Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation 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.

    Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation 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.

    Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation 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.

    Myths and Myth-makers: Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology 1872

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