On Growth and Form Abridged Edition - Softcover

Thompson, D'Arcy W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521093902 ISBN 13: 9780521093903

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1961

Synopsis

Classic of biology and modern science sets forth seminal "theory of transformation" — that one species evolves into another not by successive minor changes in individual body parts but by large-scale transformations involving the body as a whole. Rich literary style. Over 500 photographs and drawings. Index.

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: 0521093902
• ISBN 13: 9780521093903
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 359
• Editor: Bonner John Tyler