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Lodewijk 'Louis' Bolk (10 December 1866, 
Lodewijk 'Louis' Bolk (10 December 1866, Overschie
Overschie is a neighborhood of Rotterdam, Netherlands, formerly a separate village with its own municipality.
The village of Overschie was located on the intersection of four rivers called "Schie": the Delftsche Schie, Schiedamsche Schie, Delfs ...
– 17 June 1930, Amsterdam
Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the Capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population ...
) was a Dutch anatomist
Anatomy () is the branch of biology concerned with the study of the structure of organisms and their parts. Anatomy is a branch of natural science that deals with the structural organization of living things. It is an old science, having its ...
who created the fetalization theory about the human body. It states that when a human being is born, it is still a fetus
A fetus or foetus (; plural fetuses, feti, foetuses, or foeti) is the unborn offspring that develops from an animal embryo. Following embryonic development the fetal stage of development takes place. In human prenatal development, fetal deve ...
, as can be seen by its (proportionally) big head, lack of coordination, and helplessness. Furthermore, this " prematuration" is specifically human.
Gavin de Beer
Sir Gavin Rylands de Beer (1 November 1899 – 21 June 1972) was a British evolutionary embryologist, known for his work on heterochrony as recorded in his 1930 book ''Embryos and Ancestors''. He was director of the Natural History Museum, Lon ...
and Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould (; September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould sp ...
wrote about him and further developed this theory of neoteny
Neoteny (), also called juvenilization,Montagu, A. (1989). Growing Young. Bergin & Garvey: CT. is the delaying or slowing of the physiological, or somatic, development of an organism, typically an animal. Neoteny is found in modern humans compared ...
in humans.)
Also Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (, , ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, and pu ...
took Bolk's fetalization theory into account in order to introduce his own thesis on the mirror stage
The mirror stage (french: stade du miroir) is a concept in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. The mirror stage is based on the belief that infants recognize themselves in a mirror (literal) or other symbolic contraption which induces apper ...
.
Bolk wrote in Origin of Racial Characteristics in Man, “White skin...started from an ancestor with a black skin, in whose offspring hair and iris color were suppressed more and more.”
References