nopiano said:That's the best quote I've ever seen here! Now I just need to lo kip what it means. *nea*Vladimir said:Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
It means: the development of an individual organism repeats the stages by which its species as a whole evolved. It was a view held by some early followers of Darwin, e.g. Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel thought that the pharyngeal slits of a human embryo were the same as fish gills. In other words, the human embryo develops in much the same way as the human species has evolved, e.g. through a fishy stage.
Stephen Jay Gould has written well about this.
It's not taken very seriously these days.
Matt