Editing Recapitulation theory (section)

==Applications to other areas==
The idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny has been applied to some other areas.

===Cognitive development===
English philosopher [[Herbert Spencer]] was one of the most energetic proponents of evolutionary ideas to explain many phenomena. In 1861, five years before Haeckel first published on the subject, Spencer proposed a possible basis for a cultural recapitulation theory of [[education]] with the following claim:<ref name="EganEducatedMind">{{cite book |author-link=Kieran Egan (educationist) |author=Egan, Kieran |title=The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding |title-link=The Educated Mind |page=27 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |date=1997 |isbn=0-226-19036-6}}</ref>{{quotation|If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order... Education is a repetition of civilization in little.<ref name="Spencer">{{cite book|author=Herbert Spencer|author-link=Herbert Spencer|year=1861|title=Education|page=5|url=https://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=98953755}}</ref>|Herbert Spencer}}

[[G. Stanley Hall]] used Haeckel's theories as the basis for his theories of child development. His most influential work, "Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education" in 1904<ref>{{cite book |last1=Hall |first1=G. Stanley |title=Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education |date=1904 |publisher=D. Appleton and Company |location=New York |url=https://archive.org/details/adolescenceitsps01hall/page/n5}}</ref> suggested that each individual's life course recapitulated humanity's evolution from "savagery" to "civilization". Though he has influenced later childhood development theories, Hall's conception is now generally considered racist.<ref name="Lesko 1996">{{cite journal | last=Lesko | first=Nancy | title=Past, Present, and Future Conceptions of Adolescence | journal=Educational Theory | volume=46 | issue=4 | year=1996 | doi=10.1111/j.1741-5446.1996.00453.x | pages=453–472}}</ref> 
Developmental psychologist [[Jean Piaget]] favored a weaker version of the formula, according to which ontogeny ''parallels'' phylogeny because the two are subject to similar external constraints.<ref>{{harvnb|Gould|1977|pp=144}}</ref>
 
The Austrian pioneer of [[psychoanalysis]], [[Sigmund Freud]], also favored Haeckel's doctrine. He was trained as a biologist under the influence of recapitulation theory during its heyday, and retained a [[Lamarckian]] outlook with justification from the recapitulation theory.<ref name="Gould">{{harvnb|Gould|1977|pp=156–158}}</ref>  Freud also distinguished between physical and mental recapitulation, in which the differences would become an essential argument for his [[Defence mechanisms#Level 1: "Psychotic"|theory of neuroses]].<ref name="Gould"/>

In the late 20th century, studies of symbolism and learning in the field of cultural anthropology suggested that "both biological evolution and the stages in the child's cognitive development follow much the same progression of evolutionary stages as that suggested in the archaeological record".<ref name="Foster1994p387">{{cite encyclopedia | title=Symbolism: the foundation of culture | encyclopedia=Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology | author=Foster, Mary LeCron | editor=Tim Ingold | editor-link=Tim Ingold | year=1994 | pages=[https://books.google.com/books?id=j6Y2hNf35J4C&pg=PA387 pp. 386-387] |quote=While ontogeny does not generally recapitulate phylogeny in any direct sense (Gould 1977), both biological evolution and the stages in the child's cognitive development follow much the same progression of evolutionary stages as that suggested in the archaeological record (Borchert and Zihlman 1990, Bates 1979, Wynn 1979) ... Thus, one child, having been shown the moon, applied the word 'moon' to a variety of objects with similar shapes as well as to the moon itself (Bowerman 1980). This spatial globality of reference is consistent with the archaeological appearance of graphic abstraction before graphic realism.}}</ref>

===Music criticism===

The musicologist [[Richard Taruskin]] in 2005 applied the phrase "ontogeny becomes phylogeny" to the process of creating and recasting music history, often to assert a perspective or argument. For example, the peculiar development of the works by modernist composer [[Arnold Schoenberg]] (here an "ontogeny") is generalized in many histories into a "phylogeny" – a historical development ("evolution") of Western music toward [[atonal]] styles of which Schoenberg is a representative. Such [[Historiography|historiographies]] of the "collapse of traditional tonality" are faulted by music historians as asserting a rhetorical rather than historical point about tonality's "collapse".<ref name=Taruskin>{{cite book | last=Taruskin | first=Richard | title=The Oxford History of Western Music | volume=4 | year=2005 | publisher=Oxford University Press | location=New York | isbn=978-0-195-38630-1  | pages=358–361}}</ref>

Taruskin also developed a variation of the motto into the pun "ontogeny recapitulates ontology" to refute the concept of "[[absolute music]]" advancing the socio-artistic theories of the musicologist [[Carl Dahlhaus]]. [[Ontology]] is the investigation of what exactly something is, and Taruskin asserts that an art object becomes that which society and succeeding generations made of it. For example, [[Johann Sebastian Bach]]'s ''[[St. John Passion]]'', composed in the 1720s, was appropriated by the [[Nazi]] regime in the 1930s for [[propaganda]]. Taruskin claims the historical development of the ''St John Passion'' (its ontogeny) as a work with an [[anti-Semitic]] message does, in fact, inform the work's identity (its ontology), even though that was an unlikely concern of the composer. Music or even an abstract visual artwork can not be truly autonomous ("absolute") because it is defined by its historical and social reception.<ref name=Taruskin/>