Article ID: CBB001420395

Problematic “Idiosyncrasies”: Rediscovering the Historical Context of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's Science of Form (2014)

unapi

D'Arcy Thompson has often been portrayed as a loner. His science of form has frequently been labeled anachronistic, idiosyncratic, and unconnected to his contemporary biology. This article aims to challenge this interpretation. Thompson's representation as a loner did not lie in the idiosyncrasies of his science, but in our own historiography. Through the use of unedited archival sources, this study shows that Thompson's biology was well-connected to an international research program -- a program mainly shared by developmental biologists, physiologists, and morphologists. In addition, this article also aims to propose a new interpretation of Thompson's On Growth and Form. Drawing on his private correspondence and published sources, the paper re-contextualizes the contents and conclusions of Thompson's seminal work. We will see that Thompson defended a particular kind of organismal biology. The bio-science he supported stemmed not only from Aristotle's zoology or Pythagorean mathematics, but had many allies among twentieth-century naturalists.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001420395/

Similar Citations

Article Matthew Holmes; (2019)
Imitating nature: Analogy and experiment in D'Arcy Thompson's Science of Form (/isis/citation/CBB812197601/)

Book Juler, Edward; (2015)
Grown but Not Made: British Modernist Sculpture and the New Biology (/isis/citation/CBB001551962/)

Article Losano, Gianni; Pinotti, Oreste; (2000)
Physiology at the University of Turin from the Unification of Italy to the End of the Twentieth Century (/isis/citation/CBB000932397/)

Chapter Gould, Stephen Jay; (1976)
D'Arcy Thompson and the science of form (/isis/citation/CBB000012709/)

Article Geison, Gerald L.; Laubichler, Manfred D.; (2001)
The varied lives of organisms: Variation in the historiography of the biological sciences (/isis/citation/CBB000100742/)

Article D'Hombres, Emmanuel; (2012)
The “Division of Physiological Labour”: The Birth, Life and Death of a Concept (/isis/citation/CBB001220996/)

Article Nicholas Popper; (2016)
Archives and the Boundaries of Early Modern Science (/isis/citation/CBB949959104/)

Article Vittoria Feola; (2019)
Agnes Arber, Historian of Botany and Darwinian Sceptic (/isis/citation/CBB822213559/)

Article Gabriel Finkelstein; (2023)
Paris or Berlin? Claude Bernard’s rivalry with Emil du Bois-Reymond (/isis/citation/CBB757894127/)

Article Català-Gorgues, Jesús Ignasi; (2010)
López Piñero y los estudios sobre historia del evolucionismo (/isis/citation/CBB001021874/)

Chapter Mario Quaranta; (2016)
Dialogo e confronto fra lo scienziato Giorgio Piccardi e l'epistemologo Ludovico Geymonat (/isis/citation/CBB105768336/)

Article Weishampel, David B.; Reif, Wolf-Ernst; (2013)
An Untimely Nexus of German Biomechanics, Evolution and Ornithology: Dominik von Kripp and Evolutionary Functional Morphology (/isis/citation/CBB001211909/)

Authors & Contributors
Tamborini, Marco
Juler, Edward
Gavinelli, Simona
Dresow, Max
Holmes, Matthew
Weishampel, David B.
Concepts
Morphology
Biology
Historiography
Physiology
Methodology
Correspondence and corresponding
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
20th century, early
Early modern
18th century
Modern
Places
Italy
Great Britain
Spain
Germany
Europe
Berlin (Germany)
Institutions
School of Milan
Turin. Università
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment