term palingenetic ultranationalism as a core tenet of fascism, stressing the notion of fascism as an ideology of rebirth of a state or empire in the image of that which came before it – its ancestral political underpinnings. Examples of this are Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Under Benito Mussolini, Italy purported to establish an empire as the second incarnation of the Roman Empire, while Adolf Hitler's regime purported itself to be the third palingenetic incarnation of the German "Reich" – beginning first with the Holy Roman Empire ("First Reich"), followed by Bismarck's German Empire ("Second Reich") and then Nazi Germany ("Third Reich"). Moreover, Griffin's work on palingenesis in fascism analysed the pre-war fin de siècle Western society. In doing so he built on Frank Kermode's work The Sense of an Ending which sought to understand the belief in the death of society at the end of the century. Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet expressed his post-coup project in government as a national rebirth inspired in Diego Portales, a figure of the early republic: Science In modern biology (e.g., Ernst Haeckel and Fritz Müller), palingenesis has been used for the exact reproduction of ancestral features by inheritance, as opposed to kenogenesis, in which the inherited characteristics are modified by environment. It was also applied to the quite different process supposed by Karl Beurlen to be the mechanism for his orthogenetic theory of evolution. See also Palingenetic ultranationalism Notes References Reincarnation Religious philosophical concepts