Sir Peter Medawar, Nobel laureate in 1960, thought that the book On Growth and
Form by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson is ‘‘the finest work of literature in all the
annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue’’ [1].
The central theme of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s work is a critical reframing
of the theory of evolution, where he deplored overemphasis of evolution in terms of
pure Darwinism and the widespread underestimation of the impact of physical laws
and the rules of simple mechanics on ‘‘growth and form’’ of all organisms. He wrote
in 1917:
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.