n. The act of recapitulating; a summary, or concise statement or enumeration, of the principal points, facts, or statements, in a preceding discourse, argument, or essay.n. That process of development of the individual organism from the embryonic stage onward, which displays a parallel between the development of an individual animal (ontogeny) and the historical evolution of the species (phylogeny). Some authors recognize two types of recapitulation, palingenesis, in which the truly ancestral characters conserved by heredity are reproduced during development; and cenogenesis (kenogenesis or coenogenesis), the mode of individual development in which alterations in the development process have changed the original process of recapitulation and obscured the evolutionary pathway.