How To Use Atavistic In A Sentence
-
As I glean from the Wikipedia article on the subject, atavistic traits are "birth defects" more than reactions to environmental changes.
Eureka: What About Bob?
-
But atavistic, or vestigial, geotropism in Genesistrine -- or a million larvae start crawling, and a million little frogs start hopping -- knowing no more what it's all about than we do when we crawl to work in the morning and hop away at night.
The Book of the Damned
-
Stripped of any political content, today's conflicts in Northern Ireland are now what many wrongly assumed them to be during the Troubles: base, atavistic, sectarian clashes.
-
It becomes virtually impossible when your enemy is trying to inflame every atavistic passion in order to defeat you.
-
They were to become isolated to the point that they forged a new selfhood born of solitude, inspired by the type of atavistic visual symbolism that Purist painting provided.
-
It is never quite free from the old atavistic type of the trifoliolate leaves, and invariably, when external conditions become less favorable, this atavistic form is apt to gain dominion over the more refined varietal character.
Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation
-
Ultimately, it also proves the primitively atavistic nature of human beings: that altruism is an unnatural societal construct and that self-interest is the natural impulse of the human animal.
Marshall Fine: Movie Review: Inside Job
-
Members of the audience actually gasped when Hayek referred to Socialism as 'atavistic' - the reversion to an older, more primitive form.
Socialism as Primitivism, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
-
For an atavistically bloody entertainment, a bullfight includes much traditional pomp and ceremony.
-
It was abominable, atavistic and atrocious, big, black and brutal, cruel cold and callous, and so on.
-
There is more to be found in the rhapsody's orality, in archaisms and the atavistic language, in orality and folklore, in clerical-juggleresque rhetoric.
-
What I find most difficult, as a fairly new father, is balancing the desire - atavistic, primitive, not altogether politically correct - to protect my son from the dangers of the world.
-
It becomes virtually impossible when your enemy is trying to inflame every atavistic passion in order to defeat you.
-
So why must all men look like atavistic throwbacks?
-
Leni gave into her atavistic instincts and had the grilled organic lamb cutlets with minted pea purée, potato gratin, tomato salsa and red wine for €24.95.
-
The idea of grievance will seem to define them in some eternal way, and it will link them atavistically to a community of loved ones.
The GOP's Minority Deficit
-
But such cases are so infrequent that they may well be counted atavistic, that is, of the nature of a tendency to return to a previous merely animal condition.
Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living Some Things That All Sane People Ought to Know About Sex Nature and Sex Functioning; Its Place in the Economy of Life, Its Proper Training and Righteous Exercise
-
It was abominable, atavistic and atrocious, big, black and brutal, cruel cold and callous, and so on.
-
The dog has an atavistic relationship to humans.
-
And all my austere nights of midnight oil, all the books I had read, all the wisdom I had gathered, went glimmering before the ape and tiger in me that crawled up from the abysm of my heredity, atavistic, competitive and brutal, lustful with strength and desire to outswine the swine.
Chapter 27
-
Sport deals in atavistic fear, a commodity that is otherwise hard to come by in the 21st century.
Times, Sunday Times
-
In this context, extreme sports may reflect an atavistic desire to artificially inject risk into lives that seemed devoid of the excitement that only risk can provide.
-
I have come to the conclusion that certain types of people need scapegoats and sacrificial victims to satisfy some kind of atavistic sadism that compels them to attack what is beautiful and good.
First on the Ticker: Bush, Palin aide disputes book claims
-
In the country there was less noise as though they were all listening atavistically for wolves in the wide snow.
Tender is the Night
-
These atavistic hind legs are nothing less than throwbacks to a totally pre-whale stage of their existence, some fifty million years ago.
-
I have no doubt that all of us were responding to an atavistic impulse to clasp someone when we felt threatened.
-
It brings out deeply hidden atavistic instincts buried deep within you and you begin to prowl in search of prey.
-
But it divides between those whose feelings might be termed atavistic or revanchist and those who make a reasoned critique, in sorrow as much as anger, of Western policies - especially the Iraq war, the Kosovo affair from 1999 onwards, United States plans for theatre missile-defence, and, not least, the expansion of NATO.
Open Democracy News Analysis - Comments
-
Our society has become less cruelly conservative, our politics less atavistically nationalistic, and our culture less turgidly insular.
-
There is something atavistic about football.
Times, Sunday Times
-
Religion is pictured as old-fashioned, atavistic and dogmatic, defending superstition by burning scientific martyrs at the stake.
-
One of the other distressing points was his description of how this breaking down of civil society had left only those sorts of leaders who could call on atavistic or sectarian loyalties.
-
The idea of grievance seems to define them in some eternal way and link them atavistically to a community of loved ones.
2009 August 21 « Sigmund, Carl and Alfred
-
The opportunity to link in with the global economy and join the world community in commerce and the exchange of ideas and ideals has been repudiated for the dogmatic "certainty" of a perverse, atavistic gynophobia, where the "enemy within" is as handy as mother, sister, daughter, wife.
Afghanistan's McGenerals
-
In this context, extreme sports may reflect an atavistic desire to artificially inject risk into lives that seemed devoid of the excitement that only risk can provide.
-
Far from being atavistic, anti-progressive protectionists, Luddites were logical, rational people who saw financial ruin staring down the barrel at them.
-
If there was one striking thing about this performance, it is that it reminded the audience that live theatre is probably our most ancient art, which is why something deep and atavistic thrills when the curtain goes up.
-
The 4-winged homeotic mutants have changed the Hox mutation so that they atavistically recover the ancestral 4-winged insect condition, and never develop halteres.
No Longer Sleeping in Seattle - The Panda's Thumb
-
This atavistic fear of bodily hair is entirely compatible with a religion that sought to separate man from his animal origins.
-
His fate evokes the atavistic fear of Nature's fury that has been with us since the dawn of history.
-
There exist, doubtless, homologies of great atavistic importance -- I consider as such, for example, the formation of the cavity of Rusconi [the archenteron] in Ascidians and lower
Form and Function A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology
-
It brings out deeply hidden atavistic instincts buried deep within you and you begin to prowl in search of prey.
-
Perhaps some such atavistic feelings persist in Britain today about the position of someone who does personal services, such as rinsing people's smalls.
-
So why must all men look like atavistic throwbacks?
-
SR: Actually, the influences on my writing and thinking come from a totally different place, although there are certain affinities — a sense of the power of the irrational, these atavistic drives pulsing inside culture.
Ballardian » The 032c Interview: Simon Reynolds on Ballard, part 2
-
Economic fundamentalism is a dangerous, ill conceived and atavistic movement.
-
Like all inaugural pageants, this one, with its parade and balls and tacky souvenirs, is satisfying in each of us an atavistic love of kingliness.
-
Ironically, of course, these atavistic impulses no longer correspond to reality.
-
Some atavistic instinct told her that shamming death was her only protection.
MIDNIGHT IS A LONELY PLACE
-
What if, instead, the attraction is an atavistic throwback to the prehistoric human fascination with telling takes?
-
One minor agony of growing up in Northern Ireland is the atavistic tugging of ethnic loyalty.
-
If anything, those two secular nationalist movements seem to be taking more radical and atavistic forms that reflect their ethnic and religious sources.
-
Some four decades back, he had been the kind of wide-eyed teenager who thought one could volunteer for the KGB, who had believed the cloak-and-dagger stories, only to find in the organs he had romanticized an atavistic bureaucracy staffed by anti-Semites, paper pushers, careerists, and more than a few sadists.
The Return
-
The monophylly may therefore be considered as a reversion to a more primitive state and the monophyllous varieties may be called atavistic.
Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation
-
Where once its atavistic sectarianism could consume what it regarded as its traditional enemies, now it is merely consuming itself.
-
This message will probably also be zapped by the guiding hand of the all-wise “progressive” movement that atavistically the opposite of progress wants to wipe out the American model of self-government–and runs this site.
Think Progress » The Dixie Chicks Ad NBC Doesn’t Want You To See
-
So here stands contemporary American conservatism amidst its cultural liabilities and, now, its electoral failures -- with no mechanism to redeem America of its shames, atavistically resisted by minorities, and vulnerable to stigmatization as a bigoted and imperialistic political orientation.
The GOP's Minority Deficit
-
But the attempt to define and punish a category of speech as obscene is an atavistic vestige from a distant era.
-
In this moderation he has the atavistic sense of the responsibility of what used to be known as'a public services broadcaster '.
Times, Sunday Times
-
In a delivery style that was uncharacteristically fluent, he lambasted the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), describing them as "atavistic" and operating as if they are in the "dark ages".
TrinidadExpress Today's News
-
It's a visually shrewd setting, but it disembodies the priests, turning what should be a conversation and debate into a atavistic exchange of monologues.
Fernando's Desk
-
Indulging your atavistic selfish-gene impulse to replicate is neither rational nor moral.
-
It would be wrong to interpret them as atavistic remnants.
-
What if the attraction is an atavistic throwback to the prehistoric human fascination with telling tales?
-
Maybe they're just being atavistic, which is generally part of the successful business person's act anyway.
Fortune 's Stanley Bing: How Not to Work a Cocktail Party
-
But some strains of germplasm carry an excessive freightage of memories -- are, to be scientific, more atavistic than other strains; and such a strain is mine.
CHAPTER II
-
We are engaging in an atavistic, primitive, natural activity which can be justified rationally and can be defended morally, but which is not in itself a rational or moral activity.
-
There's something atavistically pleasing about not throwing away kitchen scraps; it makes you feel a better person in some small way.
-
But, if I am beginning to be reconciled to their presence, Mother's state can only be described as atavistically maternal.
Podkayne Of Mars
-
“Abstract: …fully relatavistic particle simulations allow a detailed study of a magnetized plasma galaxy model…Simulation derived morphologies, radiation intensities, frequency spectra and isophote patterns are produced by the model which can be directly compared to observational data…of barred spiral galaxies…”
Dark Energy Model Explains 'Hubble Sequence' of Galaxies | Universe Today
-
She shows how hunting in its broadest sense was endemic across the social divides and reaches to an atavistic instinct in our kind.
Times, Sunday Times
-
If the people wanted a republic now, they should not feel constrained by atavistic affection for monarchy.
Democracy and its Critics - Anglo-American democratic thought in the nineteenth century
-
Well, admittedly I had to look up "atavistic" and it means a "throwback", or old fashioned.
Latest Articles
-
It was these anomalies that first drew my father's attention to the close relationship between the criminal and the savage and made him suspect that criminal tendencies are of atavistic origin.
-
Only education, and the rational acceptance that society has to be inclusive to survive, is there to counteract our atavistic instincts.
Times, Sunday Times
-
There was always something atavistically satisfying about knowing where you stood in international sports - supporting Germany, Argentina, Greece, Albania, whoever.
-
But also, there is something pleasingly atavistic about looking at wildlife through the naked eye.
Times, Sunday Times
