Author: D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Edition: Revised
Publisher: Dover Publications
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 0486671356
On Growth and Form: The Complete Revised Edition (Dover Books on Biology)
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. Medical books On Growth and Form. Rich literary style. Over 500 photographs and drawings. Index.
First published in 1917,
On Growth and Form was at once revolutionary and conservative Medical books On Growth and Form. On Growth and Form
Download link for On Growth and Form: The Complete Revised Edition
On Growth and Form
On Growth and Form: The Complete Revised Edition
D''Arcy Thompson''s classic On Growth and Form looks at the way things grow and the shapes they take.
D'Arcy Thompson's classic On Growth and Form looks at the way things grow and the shapes they take. Analysing biological processes in their mathematical and physical aspects, this historic work, first published in 1917, has also become renowned for the sheer poetry of its descriptions. It is now available for a wider readership including a foreword by one of today's great populisers of science.
Medical Book On Growth and Form
Rich literary style. Over 500 photographs and drawings. Index.
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
, 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."
