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Take Haeckel’s pet theory, the biogenetic law, which stipulates that the development of each embryo in utero echoes the evolution of its remote ancestors.—Christoph Irmscher, WSJ, 13 Apr. 2018
: a theory of development much disputed in biology: an organism passes through successive stages resembling the series of ancestral types from which it has descended so that the ontogeny of the individual is a recapitulation of the phylogeny of the group
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