Partch is a Jungian astrologer, writer, and graphic designer. In this essay, Partch considers Thompson's interdisciplinary approach to the theory of evolution in contrast to Darwin's.

When the Scottish classicist, mathematician, and naturalist D'Arcy Thompson wrote On Growth and Form in 1917, Darwin's theory of evolution was not only relatively new, it was at the height of intellectual fashion, certainly within the scientific community if not with the religious community. Thompson's highly original thesis on morphology-the branch of biology that examines the forms and structures of living organisms-dared to question the principle of an ever-upward, genetically directed, ascending spiral toward perfection that Darwin had put forth as the notion of natural selection in his seminal work, The Origin of Species, in 1859. Where Darwin draws frequent analogies between Nature and a cow-breeder culling his herd, Thompson sees the physicist's underlying harmony of cause and effect; he sees energy interacting...