I discovered that what I had presumed was subversive thinking had been expressed much more articulately and deeply almost one hundred years earlier by the eminent and somewhat eccentric biologist Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson in his classic book On Growth and Form, published in 1917.4 It’s a wonderful book that has remained quietly revered not just in biology but in mathematics, art, and architecture, influencing thinkers and artists from Alan Turing and Julian Huxley to Jackson Pollock.
