primordial soup

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English[edit]

Etymology[edit]

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Noun[edit]

primordial soup (countable and uncountable, plural primordial soups)

  1. (informal, evolutionary theory) The state of the Earth's oceans at a very early time in the planet's history, during the early development of multicellular organisms.
  2. (figurative) a collection of ideas or things that gets refined over time
    • 1995, Nikolaos Zahariadis, Markets, States, and Public Policy[1], University of Michigan Press, →ISBN:
      While the number of ideas floating in this primordial soup is quite large , only a few ever receive serious consideration.
    • 2018, Vladimir Mirodan, The Actor and the Character[2], Taylor & Francis, →ISBN:
      Freud would place in this primordial soup Eros and Thanatos, the tensions between life and death instincts; Jung would stress identification with universal archetypes.

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