[Posted on behalf of Dr. Bookstein] Dear MorphMetters,
I'm happy to announce that my paper "Reflections on a Biometrics of Organismal Form" has just been posted for open access by the Springer journal Biological Theory. You can get a free copy by pointing your browser at https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__link.springer.com_journal_13752&d=DwIBAg&c=HPMtquzZjKY31rtkyGRFnQ&r=T8Sxf-U51iRHIXQayyjGAA&m=xOGtb5kpXyYsx7O1ZPeSGHSsh8sLGcIwYOsLoNWTC3I&s=wQclw8xhArX7488PAUkyik6iPqlhj-vA5-el7VYzF-E&e= and clicking on what is, for now, the top entry in the Latest Articles table on the home page. This article is a sequel to my 2015 article in Benedikt Hallgrimsson's journal Evolutionary Biology that introduced the BE-PwV plot as the best tool for studying integration in GMM data sets. I trace the basic idea here back nearly a hundred years, not to D'Arcy Thompson but to a hitherto-untranslated critique of his ideas by the Vivarium group under Hans Przibram in Vienna arguing that the only valid way that a biologist should study organismal form is by direct experimental observation of transformation grids: "Thompson's holistic deformations can be made comprehensible if we can visualize a space lattice upon the living form, so as to assess how each little piece changes its shape under conditions that vary by species. Here lies open a rich, nearly undeveloped field that invites a mathematization, one whose erection we hope will begin very soon." But the timing seems to have slipped a bit, namely, by 97 years. The new paper argues that BE-PwV is exactly the "mathematization" they were envisioning, which could not be made empirical until the development of geometric morphometrics, and further that it is the only morphometric method consistent with the most fundamental fact in all of biology, "the repetitive production of organized heterogeneity" (Hotchkiss 1958) or, as Walter Elsasser put it in 1987, "the transfer of information over finite intervals of time without an intermediate message." For instance, the new article demonstrates how to recognize a growth-gradient explicitly even in the presence of unstructured residual variability. I close with a plea that others help me build the bridge that we need so urgently between the arithmetic of today's burgeoning image-based data resources and the rhetoric of biological explanations of organismal form both over evolution and over development. As always I welcome all comments on these ideas, enthusiastic or otherwise. Fred Bookstein -- MORPHMET may be accessed via its webpage at http://www.morphometrics.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MORPHMET" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to morphmet+unsubscr...@morphometrics.org.
