Second Interlude

IN 1917, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS published a massive, magnificent book called On Growth and Form. It author, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, was a Scottish biologist of formidable range and considerable mathematical prowess. Much influenced by Aristotle, whose Historia Animalium he had translated from the Greek (1910), Thompson began his book by contrasting the organic and mechanical metaphors upon which biology and physics are respectively built, then declaring that neither way of thinking can do without the other. “In Aristotle’s parable, the house is there that men may live in it; but it is also there because the builders have laid one stone upon another” (1945, 6; this is the book’s second, much expanded edition published six years before Thompson’s death). The parable applies not just to the two bodies of knowledge, but to whatever can be said to grow “in conformity with physical and mathematical laws.” While Thompson largely confined himself to “the forms of living things, and of the parts of living things” (15), he did not do so exclusively....