PERSON
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson
The Victorian polymath whose 1917 masterwork On Growth and Form demonstrated that the shapes of living things are constrained by mathematics and physics before natural selection can act on them—a framework that now provides the clearest account of why intelligence, wherever it appears and in whatever substrate, takes the specific forms it takes.
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson asked the complementary question. While Darwin explained why the finches of the Galápagos differ—through the history of selective pressures acting on variation—Thompson asked why any beak, whatever its particular dimensions, curves in the specific mathematical way that all beaks curve. His answer, worked out in the thousand pages of
On Growth and Form published in 1917, was that the forms of living things are constrained by physics and mathematics in ways that no amount of selection can
override: before selection chooses among beaks, the mechanics of growing tissue have already determined what kinds of beaks are possible, and the forms that persist are the ones that satisfy the constraints of surface tension, gravity, diffusion, and structural load. The same principle he applied to bone and cell and shell now illuminates the forms of artificial intelligence with a precision