The theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism and often expressed as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is a discredited biological hypothesis. First 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...
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The theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism and often expressed as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is a discredited biological hypothesis. First 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.
In 1866, the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel proposed that the...
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