D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson received the 1942 Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the United States National Academy of Sciences. His book On Growth and Form is generally recognized as influencing important biologists like Julian Huxley and Conrad Hal Waddington and mathematicians like Alan Turing. Architecture classes often use his book to teach design and form because there are so many parallels between natural structures and forms in building design. The book is dense, but has a lot of worthwhile ideas about how animals and plants grow, with shapes that are influenced by overall mathematical principles of scale. For example, cells develop their structures because of the effect of surface tension, just like honeycombs, corals, and soap bubbles. Jellyfish show similar forms to drops placed into viscous liquid. Mollusk shells and ruminant horns take their structures from the logarithmic spiral, as do motion phenomena like the paths of cyclones and the way a hawk approaches its prey. Thompson spends a lot of time describing phyllotaxy research, which deals with biological pattern formation or morphogenesis. He describes the exact arrangement of leaves and other plant parts in detail, discusses its connection to Fibonacci numbers, and also looks at growth curves in plants, noting the importance of pulses, or growth spurts. Thompson’s ground-breaking argument is that physical forces and universal mathematical principles govern the creation of biological forms, rather than just heredity and Darwinian evolutionary theory.
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