On Growth and Form Abridged Edition - Hardcover

Thompson, D'Arcy W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521066239 ISBN 13: 9780521066235

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1961

Synopsis

Pp. xiv, 346, 181 text-figures, 2 black and white plates. Publisher’s red cloth, lettered in gilt on spine, sm 8vo. This abridge edition shortens the 1942 edition and removed passages that were out-of-date. This volume is from the research collection of herpetologist Lauren E. Brown with his signature on the front endpaper. Neat underlining on pages 273 and 322.

About this title

Review

First published in 1917, On Growth and Form was at once revolutionary and conservative. Scottish embryologist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948) grew up in the newly cast shadow of Darwinism, and he took issue with some of the orthodoxies of the day--not because they were necessarily wrong, he said, but because they violated the spirit of Occam's razor, in which simple explanations are preferable to complex ones. In the case of such subjects as the growth of eggs, skeletons, and crystals, Thompson cited mathematical authority: these were matters of "economy and transformation," and they could be explained by laws governing surface tension and the like. (He doubtless would have enjoyed the study of fractals, which came after his time.) In On Growth and Form, he examines such matters as the curve of frequency or bell curve (which explains variations in height among 10-year-old schoolboys, the florets of a daisy, the distribution of darts on a cork board, the thickness of stripes along a zebra's flanks, the shape of mountain ranges and sand dunes) and spirals (which turn up everywhere in nature you look: in the curve of a seashell, the swirl of water boiling in a saucepan, the sweep of faraway nebulae, the twist of a strand of DNA, the turns of the labyrinth in which the legendary Minotaur lived out its days). The result is an astonishingly varied book that repays skimming and close reading alike. English biologist Sir Peter Medawar called Thompson's tome "beyond comparison the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue." --Gregory McNamee

Book Description

Why do living things and physical phenomena take the forms they do? Analyzing the mathematical and physical aspects of biological processes, this historic work, first published in 1917, has become renowned as well for the poetry of is descriptions.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1961
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521066239
• ISBN 13: 9780521066235
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 360
• Editor: Bonner John Tyler