Thompson, D'Arcy Wentworth (1860-1948)

Scottish biologist and classical scholar who interpreted the structure and growth of organisms in terms of the physical forces to which every individual is subjected throughout its life. He also hypothesized, in his book On Growth and Form 1917, that the evolution of one species into another results mainly from transformations involving the entire organism. Thompson was born in Edinburgh and studied there and at Cambridge. He was professor at Dundee 1884-1917, and then at St Andrews. In 1896 and 1897 he went on expeditions to the Pribilof Islands as a member of a British-American commission on fur-seal hunting in the Bering Sea. He was also one of the British representatives on the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. In the 1942 revised edition of On Growth and Form, Thompson admitted that his evolutionary theory did not adequately account for the cumulative effect of successive small modifications. Thompson wrote many papers on fisheries and oceanography. He also published works on classical natural history, including A Glossary of Greek Birds 1895 and an edition of Aristotle's Historia animalium 1910.