Summary
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.
Presented by Phillip Ball.
Picture: Corn shell, Getty Images
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
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| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds hello Marnie |
| 0:30.7 | Chesterton from Crowds here, just gate-crashing the podcast you actually downloaded |
| 0:35.0 | to mention mine. |
| 0:37.0 | If you're the type of person who's ever wondered anything |
| 0:40.0 | about the world around you, then we are the podcast for you. |
| 0:43.7 | We take your questions on anything scientific and scour the globe for answers. |
| 0:48.3 | That's crowd science, which you can find wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:51.6 | I'll get out of your ears now as you were. |
| 0:55.0 | Hello and welcome to Discovery from the BBC World it? I'm talking about the natural marvel of geometrical precision engineering that is the honeycomb. |
| 1:15.2 | Its cells have perfectly hexagonal shapes, the ideal design for filling up space |
| 1:21.9 | with compartments that use the least amount of wax |
| 1:25.2 | and which therefore requires the bees to invest as little time and energy as |
| 1:30.6 | possible in making them. That's exactly what Charles Darwin's evolution by natural selection |
| 1:37.6 | would lead you to expect. The living world finds good solutions to problems, because those are the ones that best help organisms to |
| 1:45.6 | survive and reproduce. But does Darwinian evolution really explain the honeycomb. |
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