Atavism

Early embryos of various species display some ancestral feature, like the tail on this human fetus. These features normally disappear in later development, but it may not happen if the animal has an atavism

Atavism is the tendency to revert to ancestral type. In biology, an atavism is an evolutionary throwback, such as traits reappearing which had disappeared generations before. In the social sciences, atavism is a cultural tendency—for example, people in the modern era reverting to the ways of thinking and acting of a former time. Atavist and atavistic are derived terms.

Quotes

Gold has an almost atavistic lure. People feel it has a panacea effect. - Howard Blum.

• Gold has an almost atavistic lure. People feel it has a panacea effect.
  • Howard Blum, in Amy Meng The Lure of Gold: PW Talks with Howard Blum, publishersweekly Feb 21, 2011

• In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.
  • Don DeLillo in: Randy Laist Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo's Novels, Peter Lang, 2010, p. 77

• Milton obviously invokes vassalage for its suggestion of atavism , back-stepping toward feudal obligation and subjugation of individual liberty.
  • Mary C. Fenton in: Milton's Places of Hope: Spiritual and Political Connections of Hope with Land, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2006

Nairn rejected the view of nationalist movements, purveyed by many thinkers on the liberal and Marxist left, as residues of tribal atavism. Rather, he understood national identities as distinctively modern expressions of an enduring human need.

• Nairn rejected the view of nationalist movements, purveyed by many thinkers on the liberal and Marxist left, as residues of tribal atavism. Rather, he understood national identities as distinctively modern expressions of an enduring human need.
  • John Gray in: " Little Scotlander - Tom Nairn's nationalism is stuck in the past, argues John Gray. In his desire to forecast the collapse of the union he seems scarcely to have noticed the country Britain has become, New Statesman, 24 January 2000

• I don't think that what's going on in Bosnia is political activity. It's partly political, but it's partly atavistic as well.
  • John Keegan, in John Keegan: A History of Warfare, booknotes.org, 8 May 1994

• I mean that it is, after all, an atavistic feeling... Conventional, I agree, but somehow, deep down, a man has the feeling that he ought to look after his wife, that he is the one who ought to earn their livilihood.
  • Jo van Ammers-Küller in: Tantalus: A Novel, E. P. Dutton, 1930, p. 125

• Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country.
  • Penelope Lively in: Robert McCrum 'I'm not a historian but I can get obsessively interested in the past', The Observer, Sunday 26 August 2001

• I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers at their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever knows. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.
  • Somerset Maugham, in:The Essential W. Somerset Maugham Collection, eBookIt.com, 07-Mar-2013, p. 429

• At best, atavism is a harmless fantasy, not sustainable with any degree of persistent realism under skies crisscrossed by satellites and jet aircraft.
  • Shiva Naipaul in: Encounter, Volume 68, Martin Secker & Warburg, 1987, p. 46

• What a time experiences as evil, is usually an untimely echo of what was formerly experienced as good--the atavism of a more ancient ideal.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, in:Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Random House Publishing Group, 23-Feb-2011, p. 363

• I like best to think of the rare men of an age as suddenly emerging aftershoots of past cultures, and of their persistent strength: like the atavism of a people and its civilisation: there is thus still something in them to think of! They now seem strange, rare, and extra ordinary: and he who feels these forces in himself has to foster them in face of a different, opposing world; he has to defend them, honour them, and rear them to maturity: and he either becomes a great man thereby, or a deranged and eccentric person, if he does not altogether break down betimes. Formerly these rare qualities were usual, and were consequently regarded as common: they did not distinguish people. Perhaps they were demanded and presupposed; it was impossible to become great with them, for indeed there was also no danger of becoming insane and solitary with them. It is principally in the old-established families and castes of a people that such after-effects of old impulses present themselves, while there is no probability of such atavism where races, habits, and valuations change too rapidly. For the tempo of the evolutional forces in peoples implies just as much as in music; for our case an andante of evolution is absolutely necessary, as the tempo of a passionate and slow spirit: and the spirit of conserving families is certainly of that sort.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche in: The Gay Science, Courier Dover Publications, 7 March 2012, p. 25

• And to repeat it again: vanity is an atavism.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche in: Beyond Good and Evil, Start Publishing LLC, 18-Feb-2013 , p. 138

• The Enlightenment was the movement of thought, starting in the late 17th century and extending as far as the 19th century with political economists such as David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which self-consciously set out to liberate human reason from medieval atavism, superstition and error.
  • Melanie Phillips in: All Must Have Prizes HighBeam Business, 13 September 1996, Source: New Statesman (1996)

Literature and Science: Social Impact and Interaction

The idea of atavism was pervasive in the late nineteenth century, and police forces across Europe developed files of “mug shots” of criminals to be able to identify the “criminal type.” A version of this atavistic type is Count Dracula, as portrayed in Bram Stroker's Dracula (1897). Dracula himself is a version of degenerate, the Transylvanian aristocrat who has revolved into a parasitic being, feeding on the blood and life of others.

John H. Cartwright, Brian Baker in: Literature and Science: Social Impact and Interaction, ABC-CLIO, 1 January 2005

• The word atavistic was used by the Italian doctor and criminologist Cesare Lombroso to denote the “criminal type” and means the recurrence of “lower” behavioral or sphysical traits in “higher” forms (the return of the primitive).
  • In: p. 208

• Italian variants of Darwinist theories of evolution stressed the elements of struggle and became part of the bedrock for Lombroso's theories of crime as “atavism” (derived from the Latin word atavus, meaning ancestor)
  • In: p. 209

• The idea of atavism was pervasive in the late nineteenth century, and police forces across Europe developed files of “mug shots” of criminals to be able to identify the “criminal type.” A version of this atavistic type is Count Dracula, as portrayed in Stroker's Dracula (1897). Dracula himself is a version of degenerate, the Transylvanian aristocrat who has revolved into a parasitic being, feeding on the blood and life of others.
  • In: p. 210

• Holmes and Watson discover that a strange ape-like creature , the “Creeping Man” of the title, has been disturbing the household of the professor. When Holmes finally discovers the (barely credible) truth, the reader is transported into the world of Gothic fiction: the “creeping man” is the professor's “Hyde,” an atavistic being manifested by a strange drug.
  • In p. 215

• This story [The Time Machine] may also be a kind of reply to another text that features transformation and atavism, written some forty years before. In “The Creeping Man,” a letter, sent from Prague explains the truth of the “serum” and reveals something else: there is another recipient.
  • In: p. 217