A HUNDRED years ago, it was commonly thought that the growing human embryo passed through all its previous stages in evolution. From the single cell, to a simple multicellular creature, and then through stages corresponding to a fish, a lizard, a mouse, a monkey and then a human.
This idea was first suggested by German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), an early supporter of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Haeckel coined the phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, meaning that development and growth repeat evolutionary history. He called this the biogenetic law, and the idea became popularly known as recapitulation. In fact,…
