My favorite quote/concept of all time is this one:

Everything is the way it is because it got that way.

D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson
(allegedly)

It affects everything I look at, and it’s the perfect sentiment for a developmental biologist/evolutionary biologist. It’s what I do for a living: see something, ask how it got that way (because that is the most important question), and try to track down the causal events that led to this outcome. It’s also the fundamental flaw in creationism, because they look at things and don’t care about the how or the process or the mechanism, it’s always explained by “god did it” with no interest in how their god did it.

But the quote always bugged me, too, because it’s not in On Growth and Form, Thompson’s awesome summary of his perspective. It’s a perfect expression of Thompson’s vision, so I continue to use it and think it, but it sure would be nice to know where it came from.

Fortunately, Glenn Branch tracked it down over a decade ago.

As far as I can tell, the line is actually due to Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993), whose obituary in The New York Times described him as “a much-honored but unorthodox economist, philosopher[,] and poet … renowned less for a single contribution to economics than for a large number of interesting intellectual and moral insights that both charmed and challenged his fellow social scientists.” In his 1953 “Toward a General Theory of Growth,” Boulding referred to “the D’Arcy Thomson [sic] principle … that at any moment the form of any object, organism, or organization is a result of its laws of growth up to that moment” (emphasis in original), citing On Growth and Form. (Boulding was a prolific writer, so there may be earlier statements of the principle that I missed.) By 1968, if not earlier, Boulding was using the familiar vernacular formulation, although he always credited the insight, if not the words, to Thompson.

It’s not hugely important — I’m not into hero-worship, although Thompson comes close to being a hero — but it’s nice to tidy up the record.