biogenetic law

The discredited theory that the stages in an organism's embryonic development repeat the stages in the evolutionary history of the species. Also called Haeckel's law, recapitulation theory.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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Alternatively, it has been suggested that web asymmetry is an evolutionary derived trait and that spiders recapitulate this during individual development (the biogenetic law) such that young spiders build symmetric webs and older spiders asymmetric webs even in the absence of any adaptive advantage (Eberhard et al.

Web asymmetry in the tetragnathid orb spider Metellina mengei (Blackwell, 1869) is determined by web inclination and web size

Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) is known even to casual students of the history of Darwinism for those notorious drawings illustrating his "biogenetic law," a revival of the claim that the anatomical features of modern embryos represent key prior stages of our species' evolutionary past: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" as we used to say.

H. G. Bronn, Ernst Haeckel, and The Origins of German Darwinism: A Study in Translation and Transformation

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