On Growth and Form

November 15, 2023 3:18 AM

Toby "Tibees²" Hendy, explainer of science, has posted a beautiful 15m tribute to "The book biologists hate to read but love to cite". No, not The Origin of Species but On Growth and Form (1917) [Gutenberg Full text] by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson. MetaPrev 2008.

Stephen Wolfram gave a crit of the book for its centenary in Wired 2017: Are All Fish the Same Shape If You Stretch Them? The Victorian Tale of On Growth and Form.

The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis (1952), [MetaPrev 2013] one of the half dozen papers published by Alan Turing, has only six citations: one of which is OG&F. Philip Ball, another prolific explainer of science, deals with CBoM for the Royal Society in 2015. And for YouTube [5m].

posted by BobTheScientist (8 comments total)

u talk bio pix? y u no haeckel?
posted by lalochezia at 4:40 AM on November 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

One big thing missing in On Growth and Form is the fractal concept, an idea not sufficiently realized until later in the century. It turns out fractal shapes can be created from a wide variety of dynamics. So while the physical models in the book might not be sufficiently sophisticated, the structural self-similarities across disparate physical processes hints at the generic nature of non-linear dynamics and chaos, which we have learned a lot more about since 1917. The end result pushes the D'Arcy program even further: it places the importance not on natural selection and evolution, or biology, or even physics... no, the morphology of life is inherent in the very mathematics we use to describe it (e.g. spirals).

While D'Arcy (and Turing in the paper mentioned) are coming at fractals from continuous dynamical systems, we have since learned that fractal shapes also appear in discrete dynamical systems. This opens the possibility of using "computation" as a model of life process to arrive at the same kinds of fractal morphology. This is what Wolfram is generally going on about.
posted by grog at 8:43 AM on November 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Uh… it sounds like you are saying that biological shapes are the way they are because of mathematical models, not because of any sort of physical processes? That would be quite the expansion of the Platonic viewpoint of math as having its own existence as pure forms that we (or non-sentient life) simply discover.
posted by eviemath at 10:03 AM on November 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I thought I must have originally heard about this book in one of Stephen Jay Gould's collections--the pictures of stretchy fish and bendy skulls were so familiar--but now I can't figure out what book it would've been in. In any case, what a great video! Toby should summarize all the books that while interesting, you wouldn't necessarily read yourself.
posted by mittens at 10:18 AM on November 15, 2023

One of my all time favourite books. I have read it three times now, and intend to do so at least one more time.

Even if he is wrong, it is one of those books that consistently provokes more thought than almost anything I have read in my life.
posted by Pouteria at 6:10 AM on November 16, 2023

mittens: I thought I must have originally heard about this book in one of Stephen Jay Gould's collections--the pictures of stretchy fish and bendy skulls were so familiar--but now I can't figure out what book it would've been in.

Maybe Ontogeny and Phylogeny?
posted by clawsoon at 12:22 PM on November 16, 2023

On Growth and Form has been sitting on my bookshelf, unread, for about 30 years.
posted by neuron at 8:49 PM on November 16, 2023

Mittens The reference likely appeared in one of Gould's monthly Natural History columns which were bundled up into his best selling essay books like Ever Since Darwin and Bully for Brontosaurus. Gould had undertaken the gig to supply the glossy mag with 3,000 words every month. The only way he could fit the task into his busy schedule was to allocate an evening, sit down and write the whole thing in one session. So he wrote about what was uppermost in his mind during his day job - modulating his language, a little, for a general science audience. In 1971 he published D'Arcy Thompson and the Science of Form in New Literary History Vol. 2, No. 2, Form and Its Alternatives (Winter, 1971), pp. 229-258 (30 pages). Making a 3000 word précis of that performative erudition-salad would have been easier than some of his other monthly essays?
Full text available on JSTOR or failing that by pasting that URL into SciHub.
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:08 AM on November 17, 2023 [3 favorites]