Origins
The earliest recorded trace of a recapitulation theory is from the Egyptian Pharaoh Psamtik I (664 – 610 BCE), who used it as an hypothesis on the origin of language. The concept of recapitulation was first formulated outside of the field of biology. It was a widely held idea among traditional theories of the origin of language (glottology), assumed as a premise that children's use of language gives insights on its origin and evolution.
The idea was reprised in 1720 by Giambattista Vico, in his highly influential Scienza Nuova. The idea was first formulated into the field of biology in the 1790s among the German Natural philosophers, after which, Marcel Danesi states, it soon gained the status of a biogenetic law.
The first formal formulation was proposed by Étienne Serres in 1824–26 as what became known as the "Meckel-Serres Law", it attempted to provide a link between comparative embryology and a "pattern of unification" in the organic world. It was supported by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and became a prominent part of his ideas which suggested that past transformations of life could have had environmental causes working on the embryo, rather than on the adult as in Lamarckism. These naturalistic ideas led to disagreements with Georges Cuvier. It was widely supported in the Edinburgh and London schools of higher anatomy around 1830, notably by Robert Edmond Grant, but was opposed by Karl Ernst von Baer's ideas of divergence, and attacked by Richard Owen in the 1830s.
Read more about this topic: Recapitulation Theory
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