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Introduction
Published in Eve K. Boyle, Vondel S. E. Mahon, Rui Diogo, Handbook of Muscle Variations and Anomalies in Humans, 2022
Eve K. Boyle, Vondel S. E. Mahon, Rui Diogo
However, it should also be noted there is still some confusion about the use of the term “atavism.” Darwin and other 19th century authors considered the presence of a tail-like appendage at the height of the coccyx or lumbar spine in some human newborns to be an “atavism,” a position subscribed to by us. Indeed, some authors have described muscles associated with these structures that they suggest do resemble caudal muscles of other animals (Wiedersheim 1895). But it is also clear that many features considered to be “atavisms” in trisomic humans (e.g., Barash et al. 1970; Dunlap et al. 1986) cannot actually be atavisms, because those features were never present in our direct ancestors. However, some muscle variants and anomalies that we will describe in this book are atavistic by definition (e.g., dorsoepitrochlearis, epitrochleoanconeus, levator claviculae, opponens hallucis). What is not so clear is whether their presence is due to a developmental delay, but that is not a requirement to consider a feature as an “atavism.” This short discussion highlights the need for more research on the ontogeny of these structures in humans and other primates, which is crucial to clarify these issues.
A
Published in Anton Sebastian, A Dictionary of the History of Medicine, 2018
Atavism [Latin: atavus, ancestor] The apparent inheritance of a characteristic from a remote ancestor due to chance recombination of genes. Explained on Mendelian principles by American, Charles Benedict Davenport (1866–1944) in 1910. He also provided strong evidence for the hereditary nature of epilepsy, with David Fairchild Weeks (1874–1829) in 1911.
The Medical Management of Madness
Published in Petteri Pietikainen, Madness, 2015
Social and cultural commentators in France and other western countries used degenerationism to explain the increasingly unpredictable behaviour of radical individuals and the anonymous masses swelling in the streets of ever-growing European cities. Dirty proletarians, idle loafers, petty thieves, debauched hookers, smelly drunkards in beer joints and the insane confined in asylums had all fallen into the swamp of decay and corruption that extinguished reason, morals and free will. The word ‘atavism’ was used to describe a particular kind of degeneration in which individuals in a large group regressed to older, more primitive behavioural tendencies, governed by blind instincts and archaic memories of their ancestors. Such atavistic tendencies made the degenerate individuals more impulsive, unpredictable and violent, particularly when they gathered together (Pick 1989, 4). Degeneration was seen as an exclusively western scourge, because insanity, alcoholism, neurosyphilis and other ‘diseases of civilization’ appeared to be rare among the ‘primitive’ peoples in Africa and elsewhere (Kraepelin 2007). In the heyday of European imperialism and colonialism, this seemingly positive observation did not exactly reduce the disrespectful and abusive treatment of ethnic peoples.
The concepts of heredity and degeneration in the work of Jean-Martin Charcot
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2020
He also added the idea of heredity of similarity and heredity of metamorphosis; in the first case, a disease was transmitted identically, whereas in the second, a nervous disease emerged in the descendant, differentiating him or her from the ascendant. Heredity may be a predisposition, “heredity of the seed”—that is, a latent state that may or may not be revealed at a given time in life, or be a potential and variable disease state. For Lucas, this theory manifested itself during mental illness and was mixed together with notions of “return heredity” (or atavism, by which one resembles ancestors rather than parents), heredity of influence (influence of places and climate), and homochronic heredity (correspondence of age of manifestation; see Table 1). His theory attempted to explain situations that are no longer considered to relate to genetic transmission: goiter, impulses, passions, propensity for crime, and so forth. In this way, heredity was akin to sociological explanations: “The study and the most infallible expression of what is organic, morbid, and fatal in human nature” (Lucas 1833). This opened the way to medical–legal and anthropological studies of criminality, at the end of the century, by César Lombroso in Italy and Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) in France.
The evolution of the concept of synesthesia in the nineteenth century as revealed through the history of its name
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2020
Jörg Jewanski, Julia Simner, Sean A. Day, Nicolas Rothen, Jamie Ward
Bleuler and Lehmann developed several features of synesthesia (cf. Jewanski et al. 2019, 7–10): They described for the first time the plurality of synesthesia; emphasized a continuum between people with and without synesthesia; regarded synesthesia as a kind of atavism; showed that synesthesia was not linked to mental illness, as it was regarded in the context of Nussbaumer; and considered the phenomenon as being “existent in the predisposition of everyone” (pp. 50–51); among 596 people, they discovered a frequency of 12.8% synesthetes (which is much higher than today’s accepted 4%; Simner et al. 2006). Their term Sekundärempfindungen respectively Secundärvorstellungen derived from Nussbaumer’s term subjective “Farben”empfindungen. Due to the features of synesthesia Bleuler and Lehmann had developed, they removed the word “color” and replaced “subjective” with “secondary,” which is a more neutral term and put the phenomenon far away from an individual, subjective mental illness.
Genomic Obsolescence: What Constitutes an Ontological Threat to Human Nature?
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2019
Let us look at the essentialist version first. There are theorists who argue for the claim that having a genome of the right natural kind makes one worthy of moral consideration on par with all members “of the kingdom of ends.” Francis Fukuyama, for example, argues that human beings possess “factor X,” which grounds human dignity and is unique to genetic humans: “Every member of the human species possesses a genetic endowment that allows him or her to become a whole human being, an endowment that distinguishes a human in essence from other types of creatures” (Fukuyama 2003, 171). One could point out that, unlike H2O and water, there is not a sufficiently sharp class of genetic sequences that delineate a natural kind for any species. There are spandrels, differences in expressivity of the same gene, atavism, the possible existence of “junk DNA,” and parallel evolution. Given this, biological taxonomies are the result of a negotiation between functional and anatomical differences at the level of the phenotype and those found at the level of the genotype. All this strongly suggests that it is not clear which particular part of the genome and what sort of change to that part or other parts are ontologically relevant to moral status.