Skip to content
Download
D'Arcy Thompson

D'Arcy Thompson

Discovery
Apr 2, 2018 27 min
Open in Clue

About this episode

<p>One hundred years ago D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson published On Growth and Form, a book with a mission to put maths into biology. He showed how the shapes, forms and growth processes we see in the living world aren’t some arbitrary result of evolution’s blind searching, but are dictated by mathematical rules. A flower, a honeycomb, a dragonfly’s wing: it’s not sheer chance that these look the way they do. But can these processes be explained by physics? D'Arcy Thompson loved nature’s shapes and influenced a whole new field of systems biology, architects, designers and artists, including Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. </p><p>Presented by Phillip Ball.</p><p>Picture: Corn shell, Getty Images</p>

Listen to this episode in English to learn English

Podcast episodes are one of the highest-density ways to absorb English at native pace. D'Arcy Thompson from Discovery gives you natural dialogue, unscripted speech, and vocabulary that actually appears in real conversations.

In the Clue app, every word in the transcript is tappable. Tap an unknown word, see the translation in your language instantly, and keep listening without breaking flow.

Episodes to Learn English

More podcasts in English