Nearly a century ago, D'Arcy Thompson wrote the first edition of the book On Growth and Form, which according to Peter Medawar is "the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue." In it, Thompson, through a series of examples on a variety of scales, emphasized the role of physical laws embodied mathematically as the fundamental determinant of structure and form of organisms. This idea is complementary to modern approaches that emphasize the molecular and genetic principles underlying development and morphogenesis and provides the physical substrate on which the laws of natural selection work. In this symposium, speakers highlight some of the current work on growth and form in animals and plants using molecular approaches, physical experiments, and mathematical models.