In social sciences, atavism is the tendency of reversion: for example, people in the modern era reverting to the ways of thinking and acting of a former time. The word atavism is derived from the Latin atavus …

Atavism is a term rooted in evolutionary study, referring to instances when an organism possesses traits closer to a more remote ancestor, rather than its own parents.

ATAVISM definition: 1. a feeling or reaction that comes from long ago in human history, rather than being necessary or…. Learn more.

Atavisms are traits of distant ancestors that reappear in the modern day. In order for the trait to be an atavism, an organism's parents can't have the trait, and neither can recent ancestors. The atavism …

An atavism is the occasional reappearance of an ancestral character in an individual in a descendant species when the immediate ancestors of that species lacked the character.

This phenomenon is called atavism—the reappearance of a trait that has been lost during evolution. With atavism, it is as if our genomes serve as archives of our evolutionary past.

Millet plays with the title and with the idea of atavism, in which an ancient trait asserts itself by skipping forward a few generations to suddenly appear in the gene pool.

Her entire face stood out prominently, almost prognathously, an atavism that hinted of something deeply primitive in her. Occasionally, the genes that code for longer extremities cause a modern whale to …

An atavism is the phenomenon by which an phenotypic trait reappears in a organism after a period of absence. An atavism refers to a trait that is not present in an individual’s immediate predecessors, …

atavism, n. meanings, etymology, pronunciation and more in the Oxford English Dictionary