On Growth and Form |  | Author: D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Creator: John Tyler Bonner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $28.99
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Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 225444
Media: Paperback
Edition: Canto
Pages: 346
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 0521437768
Dewey Decimal Number: 574.31
EAN: 9780521437769
ASIN: 0521437768
Publication Date: July 31, 1992
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Amazon.com Review
First published in 1917, On Growth and Form 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 On Growth and Form, 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." --Gregory McNamee
Product Description
Why do living things and physical phenomena take the form they do? 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. A great scientist sensitive to the fascinations and beauty of the natural world tells of jumping fleas and slipper limpets; of buds and seeds; of bees' cells and rain drops; of the potter's thumb and the spider's web; of a film of soap and a bubble of oil; of a splash of a pebble in a pond. D'Arcy Thompson's writing, hailed as 'good literature as well as good science; a discourse on science as though it were a humanity', is now made available for a wider readership, with a foreword by one of today's great populisers of science, explaining the importance of the work for a new generation of readers.
Book Description
Why do living things and physical phenomena take the forms they do? Analyzing the mathematical and physical aspects of biological processes, this historic work, first published in 1917, has become renowned as well for the poetry of is descriptions.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
 Illuminates the essence of understanding - Classic Overview January 17, 1998
30 out of 32 found this review helpful
It's about so much more than the limits our minds create from standard reviews & categorizations. Shows how to organize your thinking to tackle something new. On the surface, it's a turn of the century survey & application of physical scientific knowledge. On a higher level it communicates how to effectively organize knowledge as a tool & pathway to inner understanding as only the CLASSICS can do. I was required to read it for my Brandeis Ph.D. in Biophysics, but have recommended it to home schoolers as the best single book to inform a teenager about physics, chemistry, biology, & practical thinking. The Latin roots of the title words, Form & Function, are utilized, rather than specialized contemporary jargon.
an abridged version of this wondrous book is *also* a good thing April 16, 2009
Fiona Webster (Greenbelt, MD)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
I, too, am a longtime fan of D'Arcy Thompson's endearing (enduring) classic. I've read the discussion. I appreciate very much that Golan Levin, in "Canto: An unfortunate redaction of a timeless classic," and others as well, have made it clear to Amazon customers that the Canto (Cambridge University Press) version of this book is radically abridged, as compared to Dover's (apparently) unabridged edition. This kind of comparative information--about a book's being published under different editions, and what those editions contain--is the kind of crucial info which, as things stand, we customers have to contribute.
It's unfortunate, if understandable, that the bulk of the laudatory reviews here don't specify which edition these people read. Some of them appear to be from scientists and/or mathematicians: they are, perhaps, readers of the unabridged version. Viktor Blasjo's 5-star review *does* specify: he reports from the Dover unabridged, and a great report it is, too. He convinced me to pick up a copy.
Other reviewers seem to have come to D'Arcy Thompson from a more varied background, for their words remind me of my own experience: I first read this book at the age of 19, breathlessly turning the pages, filled to the brim with a sense of growing wonder about what science could do. In Thompson's hands, science opened up the secrets of Nature, right before my eyes. I'd read a fair amount of literature for my age, so from a more sophisticated angle, I relished the many passages of elegant writing--charmingly earnest, sometimes almost passionate. (Thompson's literary excellence comes in spurts, folks, so be patient.) "On Growth and Form" came, in time, to have a big influence on me: I'd been on the fence about science vs. literature for a major, and Thompson was the first in a series of dominoes that toppled me into a chemistry major, followed by medical school and becoming a doctor.
So what edition was this marvel of a book that I read? The abridged version, the 1961 edition, from the very same publisher (Cambridge University Press) and editor (John Tyler Bonner, PhD., Professor of Biology, Princeton University) to whom Levin and others have devoted so many unkind words.
I don't know, but I rather suspect, that at least a few of the other highly positive reviews have come from people who've had their experience of "On Growth and Form" with that very same abridged version. I did hear from someone in university publishing circles, in the '70s, that it was a surprising seller for such an odd little book.
Two of the other reviewers' comments, in particular, caught my attention:
"I have recommended it to home schoolers as the
best single book to inform a teenager about physics,
chemistry, biology, & practical thinking."
"This could be read by a junior or senior in high
school. But, I think it would be more appropriate
for college."
Can these people be talking about an 1100-page book? I'll grant any young person the ability to read anything, but the attention span, the sheer time it would take, to read 1100 pages... I just don't think they're talking about the unabridged version. One of the reasons Prof. Bonner gives for abridging the text, is to streamline the presentation of the ideas so as to keep the reader's attention. Is that *so* heretical? This is a master teacher talking here!
Oops--I got ahead of myself. Yes, Bonner was in fact *my* teacher. I had a real stroke of luck: John Tyler Bonner was my professor of Introductory Biology, freshman year. I savored his verbal brilliance in the lecture hall, and especially enjoyed getting to know his gentle, lively person, on various social occasions. His research was in slime molds--mind-boggling critters who change their form from a sheetlike syncytium to tall stalks like lollipops, then back again--an organism well-suited to the ideas of Thompson regarding stretching and shrinking of surfaces according to mathematically describable patterns.
I was an undergrad in the years 1973-77, by which time Professor Bonner's 1961 edit of D'Arcy Thompson's "On Growth and Form" was churning through multiple printings as an attractive, popular trade paperback. I knew lots of people who were reading it, or had it on their shelves. It was never assigned for any course (not even Prof. Bonner's Intro Biology), but somehow we all read it--science, poli-sci, history, English majors alike. But you don't have to go back to college with me to read at least some of what we read: Prof. Bonner's original 1961 introduction is in this Cambridge/Canto edition, plus his rousing 1992 follow-up. I haven't seen the book, so I don't know anything about the nature or extent of the re-edits in 1992, but Bonner does say a bit about them.
Just in case someone missed that: I do not know about the nature or extent of the 1992 re-edits. So I'm not speaking for the quality of this specific edition--just for the 1961 Cambridge/Canto abridged edition that I came to know and love so well. It seems to bode well, though, that Prof. Bonner is still at the helm.
More generally, though, I'm speaking for the notion that there's room for both, or many: a classic book is important enough to deserve more than one treatment. Look at all the editions of classic works of fiction: abridged, unabridged, children's version, illustrated #1, illustrated #2, comic book, annotated, revised w/ newly-discovered author's notes, corrected edition after original hand-written manuscript found in trunk buried on Treasure Island...
You can read Prof. Bonner's '61 introduction (which I think is lovely, but then I would) and his '92 follow-up on the new edition (he comments insightfully about the continuing relevance of Thompson's ideas to the past 30 years' advances in biology). You can also read the foreword by Stephen Jay Gould. (I'm surprised Amazon didn't get *his* name into the author field!) Just use the oh-so-helpful LOOK INSIDE! feature. To read the Intro, do a search on "Editor's", click the first hit, read & page forward as far as you can, then click the next instance of "Editor's", and so on. (You may have to improvise a bit to read the whole intro in order.) To read Gould's forward, just search on "Gould."
I strongly encourage those of you who are interested in this issue of page-lengths of different editions, degrees of reduction of the text, etc., to use LOOK INSIDE! and read what Bonner has to say on that point. Some of the reasons he gives for further shortening of the work are truly Thompsonian. =grin= And, thanks to Amazon, you can read those remarks just as you might've in a bookstore--while you're considering which edition to buy, or whether to buy both.
Enough. Enjoy. The more the merrier.
Oh--the five stars? Those are for the Platonic ideal of D'Arcy Thompson's "On Growth and Form."
a quantitatiave approach to biology February 19, 2002
Edmund Paley
18 out of 23 found this review helpful
This book is a classic, no two ways about it. It is really the first credible attempt to start taking a quantitative approach to biology, and despite the developments of the past century (molecular biology, etc), the problems raised in this book are just as pressing as they were when thompson wrote it. Anyone working in cell biology nowadays will immediately see applications of the ideas in this book, for example to organelle morphogenesis. The genius and erudition of thompson shine through on every page, making the book inspiring to read.
A misunderstood classic October 6, 2002
Brandon E. Wolfe (Arizona, USA)
18 out of 25 found this review helpful
A great book, to be read by all biophysicists-to-be.
The modern follow-up to this book is Thom's Structural Stability, which shows that the logical conclusion of Thompson's ideas is both exciting and dubious. We probably can't just 'look' at stuff, we need to make (useful) predictions or the theory won't last. The interested reader should also pick up, if briefly, Mandelbrot's Fractal Geometry of Nature.
Two notes of interest. 1) Morphology has indeed proven successful in proving physical theory: in the aggregation of dust particals, measuring the gross fractal dimension allows you to predict the type of noise involved in creating it. 2) The logarithmic spiral, together with the fibonnaci sequence and the golden ratio, show up quite surprisingly in synchronized chaotic loops.
PS: to these I can add three more. 3) Shipman and Newell at the University of Arizona have shown that the Fibonnaci sequence in phylotaxis arises from buckling of pressurized skin (e.g. in a cactus or young sunflower) 4) Goldstein, also at UA, has shown that a broad variety of cave patterns (from ripples on the wall to bumps on stalagtites to wonderful crystaline snowflakes) all arise as a result of a single cause, the diffusion-reaction equation. 5) the late Winfree (also at UA!) has quite conclusively shown that heart beating and defribrillation are non-equilibrium sprial patterns similar to the BZ reaction.
The whole business of form has been taken up by the Sante Fe institute, see Kauffman's At Home in the Universe. Anyone who likes this book would inevitably also love Wilson's Insect Societies.
So, hopefully you understand that Thompson's book is not an island, but a visionary precursor of active research.
Mathematical-biological gems September 28, 2007
Viktor Blasjo
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a delightful book. I shall give some sample highlights. First some things from the particularly enjoyable chapter 2, "On Magnitude".
Raindrops come in the sizes 2^n (p. 59, Dover ed.). Proof: As they leave the cloud the rain drops are all of the same size. If two rain drops meet they make one raindrop of twice the mass, as so start falling faster than the singles. Thus it will never merge with a single to make a size 3 drop, but it may join another double to make a quadruple drop. Of course the quadruples fall faster than the doubles and the singles, so they will only merge with other quadruples, and so on.
Many results are derived from "dimension theory". A simple illustration is the following "paradox" of constant-temperature animals (pp. 33-34). "The heat lost must ... be proportional to the surface of the animal: and the gain must be equal to the loss, since the temperature of the body keeps constant. It would seem, therefore, that the heat lost by radiation and that gained by oxidation vary both alike, as the surface-area, or the square of the linear dimensions, of the animal. But this result is paradoxical; for whereas the heat lost may well vary as the surface-area [i.e., as l^2], that produced by oxidation ought rather to vary as the bulk of the animal [i.e., as l^3]". Thus one is "driven to the conclusion that the smaller animal does produce more heat (per unit mass) than the larger one, in order to keep pace with surface loss; and that this extra heat-production means more energy spent, more food consumed, more work done."
Another illustration of dimension theory: the maximum jumping height of an animal is constant under scaling (p. 37), for "the work done in leaping is proportional to the mass and to the height to which it is raised, W proportional to mH. But the muscular power available for this work is proportional to the mass of muscle, ... W proportional to m. It follows that H is ... a constant. In other words, all animals, provided that they are similarly fashioned, with their various levers in like proportion, ought to jump not to the same relative but to the same actual height." It follows that "neither flea nor grasshopper is a better but rather a worse jumper than a horse or a man."
Yet another illustration of dimension theory: the maximum velocity of a fish is proportional to sqrt(length), "For the velocity (V) which the fish attains depends on the work (W) it can do and the resistance (R) it must overcome. Now we have seen that the dimensions of W are l^3 [muscle volume], and of R are l^2 [surface area friction]; and by elementary mechanics W is proportional to RV^2, or V^2 proportional to W/R. Therefore V^2 is proportional to l^3/l^2=l, and V proportional to sqrt(l)" (p. 31).
For land animals, however, velocity is constant under scaling (p. 38), as we se by considering "the momentum created ... by a given force acting for a given time: mv=Ft. We know that m is proportional to l^3 and t=l/v, so that l^3v=Fl/v, or v^2=F/l^2. But whatsoever force be available, the animal may only exert so much of it as is in proportion to the strength of his own limbs, that is to say to the cross-section of bone, sinew and muscle; and all of these cross-sections are proportional to l^2, the square of the linear dimensions. The maximal force, F_max, which the animal dare exert is proportional, then, to l^2; therefore F_max/l^2=contant. And the maximal speed which the animal can safely reach ... is also constant."
Geodesics: "an instructive case is furnished by the arrangement of the muscular fibres on the surface of a hollow organ, such as the heart or the stomach. ... In fact we have a right to expect that the muscular fibres covering such organs will coincide with geodesic lines ... For if we imagine a contractible fibre ... to be fixed by its two ends upon a curved surface, it is obvious that its first effort of contraction will tend to expend itself in accommodating the band to the form of the surface, in 'stretching it tight,' ... and it is only then that further contraction will have the effect of constricting the tube and so exercising pressure on its contents. Thus the muscular fibres ... arrange themselves automatically in geodesic curves: in precisely the same manner as we also construct complex systems of geodesics whenever we wind a ball of wool or spindle a tow, or when the skilful surgeon bandages a limb" (pp. 742-744).
Comparative anatomy of bridges. A parabolic arch bridge is designed to distribute stress uniformly. Its shape is determined by a "stress diagram": if we imagine the bridge as a beam on two pillars and plot the stress as a function of position on the bridge then we get precisely the arch needed to equi-distribute this stress. More generally, "Every diagram of moments represents the outline of a framed structure which will carry the given load with a uniform horizontal stress" (p. 996), and "to precisely those stress-lines has Nature kept in the building of the bone" (p. 995). So, for example, "whenever the head and neck represent a considerable fraction of the whole weight of the body, we tend to have large bending-moments over the fore-legs, and correspondingly high spines over the vertebrae of the withers ... The case is sufficiently exemplified by the horse, and still more notably by the stag, the ox, or the pig." (p. 1003).
Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
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