D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson | |
|---|---|
 Thompson in 1886 | |
| Born | (1860-05-02)2 May 1860 Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Died | 21 June 1948(1948-06-21) (aged 88) St Andrews, Scotland |
| Education | University of Edinburgh Trinity College, Cambridge (BA) |
| Occupation | Mathematical biologist |
| Known for | On Growth and Form |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 3 daughters |
| Awards | Linnean Medal (1938) Darwin Medal (1946) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Biology,Natural history,Mathematics |
| Institutions | University College, Dundee University of St Andrews |
Sir D'Arcy Wentworth ThompsonCBFRSFRSE (2 May 1860 – 21 June 1948) was a Scottishbiologist,mathematician andclassics scholar. He was a pioneer ofmathematical and theoretical biology, travelled on expeditions to theBering Strait and held the position of Professor ofNatural History atUniversity College, Dundee for 32 years, then atSt Andrews for 31 years. He was elected a Fellow of theRoyal Society, wasknighted, and received theDarwin Medal and theDaniel Giraud Elliot Medal.
Thompson is remembered as the author of the 1917 bookOn Growth and Form, which led the way for the scientific explanation ofmorphogenesis, the process by whichpatterns and body structures are formed in plants and animals.
Thompson's description of the mathematical beauty of nature, and the mathematical basis of the forms of animals and plants, stimulated thinkers as diverse asJulian Huxley,C. H. Waddington,Alan Turing,René Thom,Claude Lévi-Strauss,Eduardo Paolozzi,Le Corbusier,Christopher Alexander andMies van der Rohe.
Thompson was born at 3 Brandon Street[1] in Edinburgh to Fanny Gamgee (sister ofSampson Gamgee) andD'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1829–1902), Classics Master atEdinburgh Academy and later Professor of Greek atQueen's College, Galway.[2] His mother, Fanny Gamgee (1840–1860), died 9 days after his birth[3] as a result of complications[4] and he was brought up by his maternal grandfather Joseph Gamgee (1801–1895),[5] a veterinary surgeon.[4] He lived with his grandfather and uncle,John Gamgee, at 12 Castle Terrace, facing north ontoEdinburgh Castle.[6]
From 1870 to 1877 he attendedThe Edinburgh Academy and won the 1st Edinburgh Academical Club Prize in 1877.[7] In 1878, hematriculated at theUniversity of Edinburgh to study medicine. Two years later, he moved toTrinity College, Cambridge to studyzoology.[8] As a student at Cambridge, D'Arcy Thompson was first asizar, and then received a scholarship.[4] To earn money to support his education he translatedHermann Müller's work on the fertilisation of flowers,[9] because the topic appealed to him. His translation was published in 1883, and included an introduction by Charles Darwin. He speculated later, that if he had chosen to translateWilhelm Olbers Focke's hybridisation of flowers, he "might have anticipated the discovery of Mendel by twenty years".[5] He graduated with aBachelor of Arts degree inNatural Science in 1883.[2]
From 1883 to 1884, Thompson stayed in Cambridge as a Junior Demonstrator in physiology, teaching students.[2] In 1884, he was appointed Professor of Biology (later Natural History) atUniversity College, Dundee, a post he held for 32 years.[10] One of his first tasks was to create aZoology Museum for teaching and research, now named after him.[11]
In 1885 he was elected a Fellow of theRoyal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers werePatrick Geddes,Frank W. Young,William Evans Hoyle andDaniel John Cunningham. He served as vice president to the Society from 1916 to 1919 and as president from 1934 to 1939.[12]
In 1896 and 1897, he went on expeditions to theBering Straits, representing the British Government in an international inquiry into thefur seal industry to assess the fur seal's declining numbers. "Thompson's diplomacy avoided an international incident" between Russia and the United States which both had hunting interests in this area.[13]
His final report for the government drew attention also to the near extinction of thesea otter and whale populations. He became one of the first to press for conservation agreements, and his recommendations contributed to the issuing of speciesprotection orders. He subsequently was appointed Scientific Adviser to theFisheries Board of Scotland and later, representative to theInternational Council for the Exploration of the Sea.[13]
He took the opportunity to collect many valuable specimens for his museum, one of the largest in the country at the time, specialising in Arctic zoology, through his links to the Dundee whalers. TheD'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum still has (in 2012) theJapanese spider crab that he collected,[14] and the rare skeleton of aSteller's Sea Cow.[15]
Whilst in Dundee, Thompson sat on the committee of management of theDundee Private Hospital for Women.[17] He was a founder member of the Dundee Social Union and pressed for it "to buy four slum properties in the town", which they renovated so that "the poorest families of Dundee could live there."[4] He encouraged and supported the social reformerMary Lily Walker in her work with the social union.[18][page needed]
In 1917, aged 57, Thompson was appointed to the Chair of Natural History at theUniversity of St Andrews, where he remained for the last 31 years of his life.[2] In 1918 he delivered theRoyal Institution Christmas Lecture onThe Fish of the Sea.[19] The German British mathematicianWalter Ledermann described in his memoir how, as an assistant in Mathematics, he met the biology Professor Thompson at St Andrews in the mid 1930s and how Thompson "was fond of exercising his skills as an amateur of mathematics", that "he used quite sophisticated mathematical methods to elucidate the shapes that occur in the living world" and "[...] differential equations, a subject which evidently lay outside d'Arcy Thompson's fields of knowledge at that time." Ledermann wrote how on one occasion he helped him, working and writing out the answer to his question.[20]
InCountry Life magazine in October 1923, he wrote:
"This is but a little town, and our lives are somewhat narrow who dwell therein; but its traditions are not lost, nor the lessons of its long history thrown away.... the stones cry out to us as we pass.... only last week I went down to the little ancient church ofSaint-Julien-le-Pauvre in Paris, and passed through it to stand for a moment (as I often do) in the deserted garden whence one looks across the river and gets the finest view of all of Notre Dame.... here have been civilization, religion and learning for a few short centuries longer than in St Andrews.... yet these two spots have a like influence on my mind and rejoice my heart with a train of shadowy memories."
— D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1923)The Essay on St Andrews.[21]
On 4 July 1901 Thompson married Maureen, elder daughter of William Drury, of Dublin.[2] His wife and three daughters survived him.[8]
He died at his home inSt Andrews after flying home from India in 1948, at the age of 87, having attended the Science Congress at Delhi, and staying in India for some months. Upon returning, "he suffered a breakdown in health, from which he never fully recovered."[8] He is buried with his maternal grandparents, the Gamgees, and half-sisters inDean Cemetery in western Edinburgh.
In 1910, Thompson published his translation ofAristotle'sHistory of Animals. He had worked on the enormous task intermittently for many years. It was not the first translation of the book into English, but the earlier attempts by Thomas Taylor (1809) and Richard Cresswell (1862) were inaccurate, and criticised at the time as showing "not only an inadequate knowledge of Greek, but an extremely imperfect acquaintance with zoology".[22] Thompson's version benefited from his excellent Greek, his expertise in zoology, his "full" knowledge ofAristotle's biology, and his command of the English language, resulting in a fine translation, "correct, free and .. idiomatic".[22] More recently, the evolutionary biologistArmand Leroi admired Thompson's translation:[23]
In Thompson's hands, Aristotle's worried prose acquires a subdued grandeur. 'Allviviparousquadrupeds, then, are furnished with anoesophagus and awindpipe, situated as in man; the same statement is applicable tooviparous quadrupeds and birds, only that the latter present diversities in the shapes of these organs.'[23]
Thompson's most famous work,On Growth and Form, led the way for the scientific explanation ofmorphogenesis, the process by whichpatterns and body structures are formed in plants and animals. It was written in Dundee, mostly in 1915, though wartime shortages and his many last-minute alterations delayed publication until 1917.[24][25] The central theme of the book is that biologists of its author's day overemphasizedevolution as the fundamental determinant of the form and structure of living organisms, and underemphasized the roles ofphysical laws andmechanics. He had previously criticizedDarwinism in his paperSome Difficulties of Darwinism in an 1884 meeting for theBritish Association for the Advancement of Science.[26]On Growth and Form explained in detail why he believed Darwinism to be an inadequate explanation for the origin of newspecies. He did not openly rejectnatural selection, but regarded it as secondary to the origin ofbiological form.[27] Instead, he advocatedstructuralism as an alternative to natural selection in governing the form of species, with a hint thatvitalism was the unseen driving force.[28]
On the concept ofallometry, the study of the relationship of body size and shape, Thompson wrote:[29]
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.
Using a mass of examples, Thompson pointed out correlations between biological forms and mechanical phenomena. He showed the similarity in the forms ofjellyfish and the forms of drops of liquid falling intoviscous fluid, and between the internal supporting structures in the hollow bones of birds and well-known engineeringtruss designs. He describedphyllotaxis (numerical relationships between spiral structures in plants) and its relationship to theFibonacci sequence.[30]
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 simplemathematical transformations.[31]
The book is a work in the "descriptive" tradition; Thompson did not articulate his insights in the form of experimental hypotheses that can be tested. He 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."[32]
Elected a Fellow of theRoyal Society in 1916,[33] elected an International honorary member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1928,[34] knighted in 1937 and received the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society in 1938.[2] In 1941, he was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society.[35] He was awarded theDarwin Medal in 1946.[36]For his revisedOn Growth and Form, he was awarded theDaniel Giraud Elliot Medal from theUnited States National Academy of Sciences in 1942.[37] He was elected Fellow of theRoyal Society of Edinburgh in 1885, and was active in the Society over many years,serving as president from 1934 to 1939.[38]
On Growth and Form has inspired thinkers including the biologistsJulian Huxley,Conrad Hal Waddington andStephen Jay Gould, the mathematiciansAlan Turing andRené Thom,[39] the anthropologistClaude Lévi-Strauss and artists includingRichard Hamilton,[40][41]Eduardo Paolozzi,[40] andBen Nicholson with his ideas on the mathematical basis of the forms of animals, and perhaps especially onmorphogenesis.[40]Jackson Pollock owned a copy.[42] Waddington and other developmental biologists were struck particularly by the chapter on Thompson's "Theory of Transformations", where he showed that the various shapes of related species (such as of fish) could be presented as geometric transformations, anticipating theevolutionary developmental biology of a century later.[43]The book led Turing to write a famous paper "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" on how patterns such as those seen on the skins of animals can emerge from a simple chemical system.[44]Lévi-Strauss cites Thompson in his 1963 bookStructural Anthropology.[45]
On Growth and Form is seen as a classic text in architecture and is admired by architects "for its exploration of natural geometries in the dynamics of growth and physical processes."[46] The architects and designersLe Corbusier,László Moholy-Nagy andMies van der Rohe were inspired by the book.[42]Peter Medawar, the 1960Nobel Laureate in Medicine, called it "the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue".[47]
In 2010, the 150th anniversary of his birth was celebrated with events and exhibitions at the Universities of Dundee and St Andrews; the main lecture theatre in the University of Dundee's Tower Building was renamed in his honour, a publication exploring his work in Dundee and the history of hisZoology Museum was published by University of Dundee Museum Services, and an exhibition on his work was held in the city.[48]
The originalZoology Museum at Dundee became neglected after his move to St Andrews. In 1956 the building, which it was housed in, was scheduled for demolition and the museum collection was dispersed, with some parts going to theBritish Museum. A teaching collection was retained and forms the core of the University of Dundee's currentD'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum.[49]In 2011, the University of Dundee was awarded a £100,000 grant byThe Art Fund to build a collection of art inspired by his ideas and collections, much of it displayed in the Museum.[49]
Special Collections at the University of St Andrews hold Thompson's personal papers which include over 30,000 items.[50] Archive Services at the University of Dundee hold records of his time at Dundee, and a collection of papers relating to Thompson collected by ProfessorAlexander David Peacock, a later holder of the chair of Natural History at University College, Dundee.[51][52]
In 1892 D'Arcy Thompson donatedDavis Straits specimens ofcrustaceans,pycnogonids, and other invertebrates to theCambridge University Museum of Zoology.[53]
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson published around 300 articles and books during his career.[13]
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