D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Born	(1860-05-02)2 May 1860 Edinburgh
Died	21 June 1948(1948-06-21) (aged 88) St Andrews
Nationality	Scottish
Occupation	Mathematical biologist
Known for	On Growth and Form

Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson CB FRS FRSE (2 May 1860, Edinburgh – 21 June 1948, St Andrews) was a Scottish biologist, mathematician, and classics scholar. A pioneering mathematical biologist, he is mainly remembered as the author of the 1917 book On Growth and Form, written largely in Dundee in 1915. Peter Medawar, the 1960 Nobel Laureate in Medicine, called it "the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue". The book pioneered the scientific explanation of morphogenesis, the process by which patterns are formed in plants and animals.

Life

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was the son of D'Arcy Thompson (1829–1902), Professor of Greek at Queen's College, Galway. (The latter was perhaps named for D'Arcy Wentworth (1762–1827) who narrowly escaped conviction on a fourth charge of highway robbery by volunteering for transportation to Botany Bay as an assistant surgeon, arriving in June 1790.) He received his secondary education at the Edinburgh Academy, which he attended from 1870 to 1877, and won the 1st Edinburgh Academical Club Prize in 1877. In 1878, he matriculated at University of Edinburgh to study medicine. Two years later, he shifted his studies to Trinity College in the University of Cambridge, obtaining the Bachelor of Arts in Natural Science in 1883. In 1884, he was appointed Professor of Biology (later Natural History) at University College, Dundee, a post he held for 32 years. One of his first tasks was to create a Zoology Museum for teaching and research - at the time this was regarded as one of the largest in the country, specialising in Arctic zoology due to D'Arcy's links to the Dundee whalers. In 1896 and 1897, D'Arcy went on his own epic expeditions to the Bering Straits, representing the British Government in an international inquiry into the fur seal industry. He took the opportunity to collect many valuable specimens for his museum, including a Japanese spider crab (still in the museum today) and the rare skeleton of a Steller's Sea Cow.

Thompson was inspired by the work of Albrecht Dürer.

In 1917, D'Arcy was appointed to the Chair of Natural History at St Andrews University, remaining there for the last 31 years of his life. D'Arcy Thompson became a well known and much loved figure in the town, walking its streets in gym shoes with a parrot on his shoulder, and contributing a stylish and scholarly essay on St Andrews to Country Life magazine in October 1923. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1916, he was knighted in 1937 and was awarded the Darwin Medal in 1946. For his revised On Growth and Form Thompson was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1942.

On Growth and Form

On Growth and Form, 1992 Dover reprint

D'Arcy's most famous work, On Growth and Form was written in Dundee, mostly in 1915, though wartime shortages and D'Arcy's many last-minute alterations delayed publication until 1917. The central theme of On Growth and Form is that biologists of its author's day overemphasized evolution as the fundamental determinant of the form and structure of living organisms, and underemphasized the roles of physical laws and mechanics. He advocated structuralism as an alternative to survival of the fittest in governing the form of species.

On the concept of allometry, the study of the relationship of body size and shape, Thompson wrote:

"An organism is so complex a thing, and growth so complex a phenomenon, that for growth to be so uniform and constant in all the parts as to keep the whole shape unchanged would indeed be an unlikely and an unusual circumstance. Rates vary, proportions change, and the whole configuration alters accordingly."

Thompson pointed out example after example of correlations between biological forms and mechanical phenomena. He showed the similarity in the forms of jellyfish and the forms of drops of liquid falling into viscous fluid, and between the internal supporting structures in the hollow bones of birds and well-known engineering truss designs. His observations of phyllotaxis (numerical relationships between spiral structures in plants) and the Fibonacci sequence has become a textbook staple.

Perhaps the most famous part of the work is chapter XVII, "The Comparison of Related Forms," where Thompson explored the degree to which differences in the forms of related animals could be described by means of relatively simple mathematical transformations.

Thompson illustrated the transformation of Argyropelecus olfersi into Sternoptyx diaphana by applying a 20° shear mapping.

Utterly sui generis, the book has never conformed to the mainstream of biological thought. It does not really include a single unifying thesis, nor, in many cases, does it attempt to establish a causal relationship between the forms emerging from physics with the comparable forms seen in biology. It is a work in the "descriptive" tradition; Thompson did not articulate his insights in the form of experimental hypotheses that can be tested. Thompson was aware of this, saying that "This book of mine has little need of preface, for indeed it is 'all preface' from beginning to end."

This huge (the current Dover edition is 1116pp long), classically composed and extensively illustrated tome has enchanted and stimulated several generations of biologists, architects, artists, mathematicians, and, of course, those working on the boundaries of these disciplines. There is a shorter (328pp) edition which preserves most of the material that is of interest to the modern reader.

Lectures

In 1918 Wentworth Thompson was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on The Fish of the Sea.

Interdisciplinary Influence

D'Arcy Thompson was a great visual thinker, and the lyrical and aesthetic terms in which he describes the mathematical beauty of nature have had a strong appeal for readers in many disciplines, something D'Arcy himself would have approved of as a strong advocate for interdisciplinary thinking. On Growth and Form has inspired many key thinkers including biologists Julian Huxley and Conrad Hal Waddington, mathematician Alan Turing and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Its influence in architecture has been immense, and the book has long been a set text on many architecture courses. Most notably, the book has inspired some of the most celebrated artists of the last century, including Henry Moore, Richard Hamilton, Jackson Pollock and many more. Many artists continue to draw on his work today, and in 2011 the University of Dundee was awarded a £100,000 grant from The Art Fund to build a collection of art inspired by D'Arcy's ideas and collections, much of which is displayed in the D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum.

D'Arcy 150th anniversary

The 150th anniversary of D'Arcy's birth was celebrated in 2010 with a programme of events and exhibitions at the University of Dundee and the University of St Andrews; the main lecture theatre in the University of Dundee's Tower Building was renamed in his honour. A publication exploring D'Arcy's work in Dundee and the history of his Zoology Museum was published by University of Dundee Museum Services and launched at the opening of an exhibition, D'Arcy Thompson: Growth and Form, in the Lamb Gallery. D'Arcy displays were also staged at Discovery Point and Sensation Science Centre.

Museum and Archives

The original Zoology Museum established by D'Arcy Thompson at Dundee became neglected after his move to St. Andrews and in 1956 the building it was housed in was scheduled for demolition and the museum collection was dispersed, with some parts going to the British Museum. However a core teaching collection was retained and now form the core of the University of Dundee's D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum, which can be found in the basement of the University's Carnelley Building and is open to the public on Friday afternoons in the summer, or by appointment.

Special Collections at the University of St Andrews hold D'Arcy Thompson's personal papers which include over 30,000 items. Archive Services at the University of Dundee hold a collection of papers relating to D'Arcy Thompson collected by Professor Alexander David Peacock, who was a later holder of the chair of Natural History at University College, Dundee. The archives also hold a number of other records relating to his time at University College, Dundee.

Bibliography

• 1885. A bibliography of Protozoa, sponges, Coelenterata, and worms, including also the Polyzoa, Brachiopoda, and Tunicata, for the years 1861-1883. Cambridge Univ. Press.
• 1895. Glossary of Greek birds. Oxford Univ. Press.
• 1897. "Report by Professor D'Arcy Thompson on his mission to the Behring Sea in 1896." Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
• 1913. On Aristotle as a biologist with a prooemion on Herbert Spencer. Oxford Univ. Press. Being the Herbert Spencer lecture delivered before the University of Oxford, 14 February 1913.

See also

• Biophysics
• Biostatistics
• Evolutionary developmental biology
• Morphogenesis

Sources

• Thompson, D W., 1992. On Growth and Form. Dover reprint of 1942 2nd ed. (1st ed., 1917). ISBN 0-486-67135-6
• --------, 1992. On Growth and Form. Cambridge Univ. Press. Abridged edition by John Tyler Bonner. ISBN 0-521-43776-8, ISBN 978-0-521-43776-9.
  • Online in Google Books
• Caudwell, C & Jarron, M, 2010. D'Arcy Thompson and his Zoology Museum in Dundee. University of Dundee Museum Services.
• Sermonti, Giuseppe (2004). "Wagner and Darwin, Hanslick and D'Arcy: from the whirlpools of becoming to the mathematical beauty.". Riv. Biol. 97 (3). pp. 357–64. PMID 15754590. 

External links

• "On growth and form" (1917)
• D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
• D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum
• Using a computer to visualise change in organisms
• Cosma Shalizi, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948).
• D'Arcy Thompson 150th anniversary homepage
• John Milnor, Geometry of Growth and Form: Commentary on D'Arcy Thompson
• Material relating to D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson at Dundee University Archives