Mr. D'Arcy's Pride

Sir Peter Medawar (1915-1987), British biologist, zoologist and co-winner (with Macfarlane Burnet) of the 1960 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work on acquired immunological tolerance, famously saluted On Growth and Form (1917, rev. 1942), the influential morphological classic by the fabled Scottish zoologist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948):

Beyond comparison the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue ... [with] ... a beauty and clarity of writing that may never be surpassed ...

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was an aristocrat of learning whose intellectual endowments are not likely ever again to be combined within one man. He was a classicist of sufficient distinction to have become President of the Classical Associations of England and Wales and Scotland; a mathematician good enough to have an entirely mathematical paper accepted for publication by the Royal Society; and a naturalist who held important chairs for sixty-four years, that is, for all but the time into which we must nowadays squeeze the whole of our lives from birth until professional retirement. He was a famous conversationalist and lecturer (the two are often thought to go together, but seldom do), and the author of a work which, considered as literature, is the equal of anything of Pater's or Logan Pearsall Smith's in its complete mastery of the bel canto style. Add to all this that he was over six feet tall, with the build and carriage of a Viking and with the pride of bearing that comes from good looks known to be possessed.


Where everybody knew his name: D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson at Trinity College, Cambridge c. 1883.

D’Arcy Thompson (he was always called that, or D'Arcy) had not merely the makings but the actual accomplishments of three scholars. All three were eminent, even if, judged by the standards which he himself would have applied to them, none could strictly be called great. If the three scholars had merely been added together in D’Arcy Thompson, each working independently of the others, then I think we should find it hard to repudiate the idea that he was an amateur, though a patrician among amateurs; we should say, perhaps that great as were his accomplishments, he lacked that deep sense of engagement that marks the professional scholar of the present day.

But they were not merely added together; they were integrally -- Clifford Dobell said chemically -- combined. I am trying to say that he was not one of those who have made two or more separate and somewhat incongruous reputations, like a composer-chemist or politician-novelist, or like the one man who has both ridden in the Grand National and become a Fellow of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest and most famous society of scientists; but that he was a man who comprehended many things with an undivided mind. In the range and quality of his learning, the uses to which he put it, and the style in which he made it known I see not an amateur, but, in the proper sense of that term, a natural philosopher - though one dare not call him so without a hurried qualification, for fear he might be thought to have practised what the Germans call Naturphilosophie.

Cosma Shalizi:

D'Arcy Thompson was a British biologist and a classical scholar (translator of Aristotle's biological works, author of Greek Birds and Greek Fishes). His masterwork, On Growth and Form, is a profound consideration of the shapes of living things, starting from the simple premiss that "everything is the way it is because it got that way." Hence one must study not only finished forms, but also the forces that moulded them: "the form of an object is a 'diagram of forces', in this sense, at least, that from it we can judge of or deduce the forces that are acting or have acted upon it." Now by "forces" Thompson meant forces, and one of his great themes is the tremendous light cast on living things by using mathematics to describe their shapes and fairly simple physics and chemistry to explain them. In other words, Thompson wrote a thousand page treatise on self-organization long before the word existed...

Turn of the century biologists with classical educations who thought they had an alternative to Darwin are a dime a dozen; two things make Thompson worth remembering. One is the sheer brilliance of On Growth and Form, which would deserve an honored place in the history of biology were the writing ever so bad. The other is that the writing is brilliant, that Thompson had one of the best prose styles of any scientist; indeed, an excellent writer, period...

Given the combination of real intellectual power and great rhetorical force, it's not surprising that On Growth and Form has had great influence outside biology (e.g. on design), and even to some degree within it, though less than one might expect. He had many valuable ideas, but opened up few routes for sustained investigation. This is a key point to posthumous success as a scientist, and one reason why the ancestors of modern developmental biology were the people (like Needham) who were re-arranging sea-urchin and newt embryoes and injecting everything they could find into them, and not Thompson, whose influence has been more indirect and inspirational...

Peter Coates reviews a reissue of the widely-distributed 1961 abridgement of On Growth and Form, and in his full review here introduced notes the sacrifices that abridgement entailed: the full 1942 edition, reprinted by Dover Publications in 1992, clocks in at over 1100 pages:

MONDAY MAY 2ND, 2011

An Elegant and Original Idea

By Peter Coates

Peter Coates is an artist, programmer, and writer living in Brooklyn.

On Growth and Form by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson

Cambridge University Press, 345 pp., $31.00

Growing up the son of two scientists, in a house stuffed with thousands of books and journals, it was ironic that I discovered D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form on the book stand at the corner Drug Fair store. I must have read half of it while hiding out behind the racks, which was no small feat — even the heavily abridged 1961 edition from Cambridge University Press runs to 345 dense pages. (The unabridged version of the Complete Revised Edition is an almost cubical 1,100 pages.) Long before finishing, I was pointedly reminded that the library was across the street. No matter; as it happened, we did have a copy at home. Of course we did. Our house had two subscriptions to The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: one for the adults, and one for the kids.

Completed in 1915 and first published in 1917, On Growth and Form had already been in print for 50 years when I found it, but it was revelatory: like opening the curtains and finding not the backyard but the Himalayas. Fourteen is an impressionable age, but any number of more mature readers have reacted in the same way, for Thompson’s book is not just about a theory of biology — it presents a way of seeing the natural world through ideas rendered as literature.

Too often, we’re introduced to the natural sciences by a route that seems designed to repel anyone with a degree of sensitivity to beauty: hacking away at brain-dead frogs, calculating the trajectory of imaginary cannon balls, and coaxing minuscule electric currents from vegetables. The scientific content of On Growth and Form has the opposite effect; it is about how a few simple mathematical principles dictate the structure of living things. Animals and plants are presented as the living embodiment of equations of scale across domains of linear measure, mass, temperature, speed; each plant and animal as a cloud of mathematical, almost Platonic, truths. Scientific principles are also revealed in the context of their connection to philosophy, history, and the elegant use of language and learning; a profound revelation of both the spaciousness and the interconnectedness of ideas. It is difficult to convey the impact this combination of ideas and writing delivers to a young mind at the right moment.

Peter Medawar famously called On Growth and Form “beyond comparison the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue,” but it is not merely a literary expression of established knowledge; it’s one of the most peculiar and original works of modern science, advancing an idiosyncratic view of how organisms develop, a view that was deeply at odds with the intellectual climate of Thompson’s time. An elegant expression of an original idea that is still, possibly even increasingly, influential in biology, it’s a work of literature that can be read for pleasure by scientists and nonscientists, and a textbook on how to think in any field.

Stylistically, it has profoundly influenced generations of scientist-authors: Benoit Mandelbrot’s seminalThe Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982) emulates both Thompson’s literary approach and his audacity in presenting a mathematical view of nature contrary to the prevailing view. Mandelbrot’s somewhat imperious style excites more admiration than affection. Oliver Sacks’ Migraine, which for many years was the most comprehensive overview of the field, though mostly nonmathematical, has more of Thompson’s grace and modesty. In this, Sacks may be Thompson’s truest heir. One of the lasting pleasures of On Growth and Form is in finding echoes of it in so many places, from the essays of Isaac Asimov, to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel , Escher, Bach, to Edward Tufte’s influential (and gorgeous) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. One work contemporary with Thompson’s is also worth mentioning. The Curves of Life (1914) by Theodore Andrea Cook covers some of the same mathematical territory, particularly as related to natural spirals, but with a heavy emphasis on their occurrence in architecture and art.

*****

D’Arcy Thompson was born in Edinburgh in 1869, one year after the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and fifteen years before Einstein’s birth. Physics, in Thompson’s time, was a mature science, and highly mathematical — Boltzmann, Kelvin, Gibbs, Maxwell, and others had brought classical Newtonian physics to its apogee in the late 19th century; quantum mechanics and relativity, which burst on the scene just after the turn of the century, do not even have truly satisfying nonmathematical expressions. But in the first decades of the 20th century, biology still had one foot in the 19th; essentially premathematical, it was still as deeply connected to the spirit of natural philosophy as to modern science.

The epitome of the Victorian polymath, a classics scholar, mathematician, zoologist, and naturalist, Thompson is said to have been offered his choice of professorships in the Greek and Latin classics, mathematics, or zoology. He chose zoology, but his books are the products of a mind that integrates these disparate fields and more. Perhaps no other scholar could have written his Greek Birds and Greek Fishes, commentaries on every bird and fish mentioned in the extant classical Greek texts...

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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.) InOn 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. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.