| I have no doubt that all of us were responding to an atavistic impulse to clasp someone when we felt threatened. |
|
| One minor agony of growing up in Northern Ireland is the atavistic tugging of ethnic loyalty. |
|
| It brings out deeply hidden atavistic instincts buried deep within you and you begin to prowl in search of prey. |
|
| What if the attraction is an atavistic throwback to the prehistoric human fascination with telling tales? |
|
| Religion is pictured as old-fashioned, atavistic and dogmatic, defending superstition by burning scientific martyrs at the stake. |
|
| 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. |
|
| But the attempt to define and punish a category of speech as obscene is an atavistic vestige from a distant era. |
|
| Indulging your atavistic selfish-gene impulse to replicate is neither rational nor moral. |
|
| These atavistic hind legs are nothing less than throwbacks to a totally pre-whale stage of their existence, some fifty million years ago. |
|
| Where once its atavistic sectarianism could consume what it regarded as its traditional enemies, now it is merely consuming itself. |
|
| These atavistic triggers, however, aren't very satisfying explanations taken alone. |
|
| 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. |
|
| His close-cut blue suits and pinched shirt collars make him look prim even by Washington's atavistic standards of attire. |
|
| Europhiles admit that nation-states still exert a certain atavistic hold over the imaginations of ordinary Europeans. |
|
| The sight of one in a field can be enough to rekindle atavistic affections that lie deep within. |
|
| Russian tourists are often shockingly messy, perhaps because of an atavistic sense that there is always more land to move on to. |
|
| If anything, those two secular nationalist movements seem to be taking more radical and atavistic forms that reflect their ethnic and religious sources. |
|
| I see atavistic inferiority complexes felt by Spanish artists with respect to our European brothers. |
|
| 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. |
|
|
|
| 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. |
|
| 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. |
|
| Far from being atavistic, anti-progressive protectionists, Luddites were logical, rational people who saw financial ruin staring down the barrel at them. |
|
| Perhaps some such atavistic feelings persist in Britain today about the position of someone who does personal services, such as rinsing people's smalls. |
|
| That jarring clash mocked their faces, made grimmer by anxiety, crushing any peace and arousing atavistic fears. |
|
| We are good at science in Europe, but we have proved unable to find a way to deal with something as atavistic as fear. |
|
| Sitting face to face with a Satmar man schooling her in atavistic Satmar rules was the last place she wanted to be. |
|
| If so, we descend from the rational level to a completely basic, atavistic level that goes to the bedrock of personal and collective existence. |
|
| These councils have been seeking amendments in the Hindu Marriage Act to support their atavistic views. |
|
| Its power comes from the spectacle of a civilized, middle-class Maine doctor succumbing to the atavistic impulse to answer violence with violence. |
|
| These problems are supplemented by the atavistic ones which make today this contrast even more dramatic, in the background of official declaration on human dignity and freedom. |
|
| Reactivation of a dormant atavistic gene could account for the abnormal costocoracoid ligament in humans. |
|
| Thus the gene which produced atavistic digits in the vigorous heterozygous pentadactyl condition is a lethal monster in the homozygous condition. |
|
| Although the heterozygote gives it an atavistic appearance, the gene is not atavistic. |
|
| Werewolfdom is caused by a virus, somewhat like rabies, which liberates an atavistic part of the brain that human beings have lost. |
|
| His chief contention was the existence of a hereditary, or atavistic, class of criminals who are in effect biological throwbacks to a more primitive stage of human evolution. |
|
| But even amidst change there has often been a holding on to the past, which is psychologically understandable, or a tendency to atavistic bad practice. |
|
| What is to say that modern city-dwellers who feel that they must periodically pack their bags and be off somewhere are not subject to the atavistic impulse to go walkabout as well? |
|
| Brodsky's atavistic model is based on the idea that monocular OKN asymmetry reflects a phylogenetically ancient subcortical system seen in laterally eyed animals. |
|
| Indeed, for Darwin as for Stoker, hirsuteness is an atavistic feature. |
|
