Dictionary

malconformation en · NOUN

Etymology

From mal- + conformation.

Meanings

1. (archaic) Imperfect, disproportionate, or defective formation, usually of body parts.
   • A sensitive person feels, and an imaginative one exaggerates any defect—and Lord Byron was both. His lameness originating, as it did, in an unsightly malconformation, was a perpetual source of bitterness to him. 1841, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Female Portrait Gallery:
   • Weakly and irritable, hysterical, passionate, and especially voluptuous women of a plethoric habit, are most liable to miscarriage; though it may also happen from a general defective constitution, or rather from a malconformation of the sexual organs. 1802, Domestic Encyclopædia, Abortion:
   • Harelip, spina bifida, malconformations of the genital organs, so frequent in degenerates, have nothing to do with ancestral types; and sterility, which is the inevitable outcome of degeneration, can have but little relation to atavism. 1895 July 14, Charles Féré, Popular Science Monthly, Morbid Heredity:
   • The most obvious case is, that modifications accumulated solely for the good of the young or larva, will, it may safely be concluded, affect the structure of the adult; in the same manner as any malconformation affecting the early embryo, seriously affects the whole organisation of the adult. The several parts of the body which are homologous, and which, at an early embryonic period, are alike, seem liable to vary in an allied manner: we see this in the right and left sides of the body varying in the same manner; in the front and hind legs, and even in the jaws and limbs, varying together, for the lower jaw is believed to be homologous with the limbs. These tendencies, I do not doubt, may be mastered more or less completely by natural selection: thus a family of stags once existed with an antler only on one side; and if this had been of any great use to the breed it might probably have been rendered permanent by natural selection. 1859 November 24, Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, […], London: John Murray, […], →OCLC:

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