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.

Life Thompson was born in Edinburgh. In 1877 he went to Edinburgh University to study medicine and in 1880 continued his studies at Cambridge. He graduated 1883 and was appointed professor of biology 1884 at the New University College, Dundee. 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 1917 he was appointed professor of natural history at United College, now a part of St Andrews University.

Work 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). 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.