Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny

I think, therefore I blog - 18th century Blogopotamian Logician, Rainy Day Cards, in his proof that his blog, while full of flatulant nonesense that nobody need ever read, does in fact exist.

So back in the days before Google and Wikipedia, when bloggers were forced to post their anonymous musings on bathroom walls and tree trunks, I was sitting in grad school reading the world's shortest, most complicated and kind of silly play on words trying to make some sense out of it:

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny.

Ontogeny (the subject of the sentence) for a biologist, or for people who think biologists know what they are talking about, is the growth or change an organism goes through during its life. Ad Ovum through the fetal stages out the chute, screaming baby in a dumpster, pimply geek, rowdy experimenter of drugs, suit-wearing overbearing twit to dusty dead-dude.

Recapitulation (the verb in the sentence) is basically a quick recap, like on ESPN news when they say: "The Red Sox defeated the Orioles 5-2 behind the strong pitching of Merriweather Lewis and a three run homer from Barack Obama."

It could also mean surrendering for a second time as in: The French army having already surrendered, then re-capitulated, but that's not a very common usage and doesn't make Ernst Haeckel's baffling sentence any clearer.

Phylogeny (the object of the sentence) is basically the whole history of life on this planet from archaebacteria (snot) through the oxygen holocaust (BCE 1.2 billion years), the Cambrian explosion (500 MYA) the Cambrian implosion (250 MYA) to the up to the point when graffitti artists evolved into bloggers and founded Blogopotamia.

So this really complicated sentence written in Geek in 1866 by the German Darwin Wannabe Ernst Haeckel basically translates into. Your life is like a sportscenter recap of the history of life.

Evidence of this theory comes from the fact that we are born out of slimy swimming things that appear in a kind of intertidal pool where they gradually grow into long creatures with spinal chords and gills that seredipititiously grow into gigantic and terrible lizards that get wiped out by meteorites and are replaced by tiny rats that turn into crank phone callers and then bloggers.

That and fuzzy pictures of embryos (above) were enough to convince many diffident Germans that it was time to take the reigns of natural selection and ride the gnarly curls of the industrial wave across Europe and into a new world order that soon came crashing down around heads.

The really clever thing about this sentence is that it's really hard to say and even harder to understand. So if you say it correctly and in context during graduate school you automatically win over the hearts and minds of everybody in the room who believes that life is so completely pointless that they are thinking of going home and shooting their cat.

It's also sort of a play on words because one of the other ridiculously hard to understand concepts they teach you in grad school is "Ontological" which roughly translates into a circular argument that "proves" that God exists because nothing this good could possibly be made by anything less than god. Such as: "I blog, therefore I am. I am really awesome, but my parents were jerks so the only reasonable explanation is that god made me awesome, therefore god exists."

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, aka the theory of recapitulation for the people whose Onts get mixed up with their phyls and philes, was a similarly ill-conceived proof that the testamental god doesn't exist because our own fetuses evolve through the primal forms of our ancestors.

As with Freudian Psychology as soon as Haeckel's theory was thoroughly discredited and discarded by scientists, it was discovered by the humanities professors who at the time were out taking a smoke break by the University dumpster.

History of Western Philosophy Professor: "Cool sentence dude. Are you just going to throw that away?"

Science intern: "Yeah man you can have it. It's almost entirely false, but you can have it if you want. What are you going to put it on the wall? Don't make fun of me! Are you making fun of me?"

"No man, that's really profound. Like everybody's life is just like reliving all the other lives that have ever existed. It's unbelievable. I'm going to say this at least 3 times per year in all my classes until everybody wants to shoot their cat."

"Whatever."