Oncology Recapitulates Phrenology
For no good reason at all, I asked Amanda the other night, "What does 'Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' mean?" I'd heard it before, and was pretty sure that I had learned it in Miss La Bella's class sophomore year of high school, but I couldn't be sure what it was. It sounded biology-related, but Amanda had never heard of it.
She came back the next day with an email recounting her experiences with Google on the matter:
So, I looked the phrase up this morning and got mixed hits of philosophy, common descent, and a weird list of songs for a CD by Hieronymus Firebrain. So yeah.
Turns out it used to mean something related to evolutionary theory, was proven wrong, and is now used by insane, right-wing, anti-evolution groups to disprove evolution as a whole:
Hi? That was a term coined in the 1800s. Does everything that people in the 1800s believed still hold true? I don't think so. Grr.
'Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' also has meanings in artifical intelligence studies. From Dictionary.com via Amanda:
For AI systems, what "exists" is that which can be represented. When the knowledge about a domain is represented in a declarative language, the set of objects that can be represented is called the universe of discourse. We can describe the ontology of a program by defining a set of representational terms. Definitions associate the names of entities in the universe of discourse (e.g. classes, relations, functions or other objects) with human-readable text describing what the names mean, and formal axioms that constrain the interpretation and well-formed use of these terms. Formally, an ontology is the statement of a logical theory.
A set of agents that share the same ontology will be able to communicate about a domain of discourse without necessarily operating on a globally shared theory. We say that an agent commits to an ontology if its observable actions are consistent with the definitions in the ontology. The idea of ontological commitment is based on the Knowledge-Level perspective.
But I had no idea what 85% of that meant. So last night I coined a new phrase, Oncology Recapitulates Phrenology. It probably means something, to someone, much like 'Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny' means something to someone. They are both meaningless to me.
December 04, 2002 - 03:22 PM
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A comp sci professor of mine used to use this phrase all the time. Now, I’m not sure whether or not he was just screwing with us (because he did, a lot), but he explained it thusly:
As an organism grows from fertilized egg to newborn animal, the stages of its development during gestation perform a sort of fast-forward replay of evolution or goes through stages which resemble simple life forms. You can see various features of lower organisms in human fetuses as they develop, including fins, tails, and lizard-like brain structures. These eventually change and improve to become the end result.
This comp sci professor compared this to the teaching approach of some profs, where they forced undergrads to go through assembly language programming and COBOL before they could progress to C and Pascal, and on to C++ and Java and Lisp.
He disagreed, saying that even though we had to cover the same grounds as our ancestors when we developed physically, we should be able to just jump into the present state of the art in mental development with a minimum of backtracking.
Whew. I hope I made sense, and was describing the right thing. And I hope that was interesting. Because I’ve always felt like a big egghead for carrying that phrase and its meaning around in my head all these years. :)
Oh yeah, and I caught a link to your site in my referrers, so hi there :)
The dictionary.com reference is for the word “ontology” not “Ontogeny.” Willard Van Orman Quine, an American Philosopher coined the phrase “Ontology recapitulates Phylogeny.” See http://mcraeclan.com/Graeme/Language/OntogenyRecapitulatesPhylogeny.htm