On Growth and Form - download pdf or read online

By D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, John Tyler Bonner

ISBN-10: 1107672562

ISBN-13: 9781107672567

Why do residing issues and actual phenomena take the shape they do? D'Arcy Thompson's vintage On progress and shape seems on the manner issues develop and the shapes they take. Analysing organic procedures of their mathematical and actual elements, this ancient paintings, first released in 1917, has additionally turn into popular for the sheer poetry of its descriptions. a very good scientist delicate to the fascinations and sweetness of the wildlife tells of leaping fleas and slipper limpets; of buds and seeds; of bees' cells and rain drops; of the potter's thumb and the spider's net; of a movie of cleaning soap and a bubble of oil; of a dash of a pebble in a pond.

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Book Description

Analysing organic strategies of their mathematical and actual features, this ancient paintings, first released in 1917, has additionally develop into popular for the sheer poetry of its descriptions. it really is now to be had for a much broader readership together with a foreword via one in all present day nice populisers of technology.

About the Author

fm.author_biographical_note1

John Tyler Bonner is professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton collage. His books comprise "The Social Amoebae: The Biology of mobile Slime Molds" and "Why dimension concerns: From micro organism to Blue Whales" (both Princeton). 

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Example text

Inherited from Hegel, it dominated Oken’s Naturphilosophie and lingered among his later disciples, who were wont to liken the course of organic evolution not to the straggling branches of a tree, but to the building of a temple, divinely planned, and the crowning of it with its polished minarets. It is retained, somewhat crudely, in modern embryology, by those who see in the early processes of growth a significance ‘rather prospective than retrospective’, such that the embryonic phenomena must ‘be referred directly to their usefulness in building up the body of the future animal’;3—which is no more, and no less, than to say, with Aristotle, that the organism is the τέλος, or final cause, of its own processes of generation and development.

But the sad truth, as Bradfield11 has shown recently in some radiographic studies, is that the egg passes down the oviduct pointed end first and is flipped around just before laying. So all the compelling argument is precisely the reverse of the facts. 12 There is also a section in this chapter on the shape of seaurchin tests which is only moderately convincing, and finally there are a few excellent pages on the form or angle of branching of blood vessels, most of which has been preserved and appended to Chapter IV.

By doing so he turned old facts into new knowledge; and was well content if he could bring diverse phenomena under ‘two or three Principles of Motion’ even ‘though the Causes of these Principles were not yet discovered’. Moreover, the naturalist and the physicist will continue to speak of ‘causes’, just as of old, though it may be with some mental reservations: for, as a French philosopher said in a kindred difficulty: ‘ce sont là des manières de s’exprimer, et si elles sont interdites il faut renoncer à parler de ces choses’.

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On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, John Tyler Bonner


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