Writers sometimes invoke the proverb 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' to suggest that an individual's development echoes the stages of their society's or species' evolution.

Many 19th-century biologists advocated recapitulationism to explain similarities between embryos and adult forms of other species.

The recapitulationists at the conference argued that early embryonic stages mirror a species' evolutionary history.

The recapitulationist argued that embryonic development mirrored the species' evolutionary history, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.