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Reversion to an earlier type
Answer for the clue "Reversion to an earlier type ", 7 letters:
atavism
Alternative clues for the word atavism
Word definitions for atavism in dictionaries
Wiktionary
Word definitions in Wiktionary
n. 1 The reappearance of an ancestral characteristic in an organism after several generations of absence. 2 The recurrence or reversion to a past behaviour, method, characteristic or style after a long period of absence. 3 (context sociology English) Reversion ...
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Word definitions in The Collaborative International Dictionary
Atavism \At"a*vism\, n. [L. atavus an ancestor, fr. avus a grandfather.] The recurrence, or a tendency to a recurrence, of the original type of a species in the progeny of its varieties; resemblance to remote rather than to near ancestors; reversion to ...
Wikipedia
Word definitions in Wikipedia
In biology , an atavism is an evolutionary throwback, such as traits reappearing which had disappeared generations before. Atavisms can occur in several ways. One way is when genes for previously existing phenotypical features are preserved in DNA , and ...
WordNet
Word definitions in WordNet
n. a reappearance of an earlier characteristic [syn: reversion , throwback ]
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Word definitions in Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1833, from French atavisme , attested by 1820s, from Latin atavus "ancestor, forefather," from at- perhaps here meaning "beyond" + avus "grandfather," from PIE *awo- "adult male relative other than the father" (see uncle ).
Usage examples of atavism.
Few humans had ever visited them, and fewer had returned, for while the citified Blueskins lacked some of the unpleasant habits of their savage brethren, they were inclined to be touchy and had some unpleasant tendencies toward atavism.
He was too focused, too direct, too impetuous and emotional, a living fossil atavism in a gentler and easier society.
They serve the men who lead the commercial life, give to their sons somnambulistic educations, preach that sleep-walking is the only way to walk, and that the persons who walk otherwise are atavisms or anarchists.
Many landholders had wisely kept the settlements small and widely dispersed, but Joachim Sardili, the kindhearted buffoon, had allowed the hooded atavisms to settle wherever they wished.
With the disappearance of nations, their respective nationalisms will also disappear, and such notions as national defense, or espionage, or national security will just stop to make any sense, and will start looking like atavisms inherited from the Stone Age.
Now it is probable that some of us will have been so talked by the more superstitious Bayreuth pilgrims into regarding Die Gotterdammerung as the mighty climax to a mighty epic, more Wagnerian than all the other three sections put together, as not to dare notice this startling atavism, especially if we find the trio-conjurations more exhilarating than the metaphysical discourses of Wotan in the three true music dramas of The Ring.
He savored the instant of complete atavism and then he became coldly practical.
Another would plead atavism, and say he got his religious instincts from his great-grandfather, as some do their complexion or their temper.
He was, so he admitted, and her heart filled the gaps her intellect failed to bridge, a throwback, an atavism, a creature unable to catch the progress of his kind.
Their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a recognition, a remembering, a return and a homecoming to a remote, primordial, an inclusive houschold of the soul, out of which those concepts grew originall: philosophizing is to this extent a kind of atavism of the highest order.
It's one of those neoprimitive colonies founded by lunatics with weird ideas, atavism trapped in an ideological feedback loop.