biomorphn.
/ˈbʌɪə(ʊ)mɔːf/, U.S. /ˈbaɪəˌmɔrf/ 1. Chiefly Art. A representation or likeness of a living organism, in decorative, artistic, or diagrammatic form.
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society > leisure > the arts > visual arts > representation in art > [noun] > an artistic representation > of living thing
biomorph1895
1895 A. C. Haddon Evol. Art 126 The biomorph is the representation of anything living in contradistinction to the skeuomorph.
1944 College Art Jrnl. 3 43 The fantasy of the drawings is governed by certain easily definable pre-occupations. All are biomorphs; that is, images of living forms.
1954 Archit. Rev. 115 272/2 Leaden echoes of lively biomorphs with a sinister absence of meaning.
1997 Guardian 10 Feb. ii. 10/3 Her paintings writhed with..playful humanoid biomorphs and centaurs, which mixed surrealism with French Existentialist abstraction.
2. A line-drawn form generated by a computer program through a process which mimics natural selection, used to illustrate the evolutionary development of complex living organisms.
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1986 R. Dawkins Blind Watchmaker iii. 55 From now on I shall stop calling these creatures ‘trees’, and shall call them ‘bodies’ or ‘biomorphs’.
1992 S. Levy Artific. Life vi. 172 The selector was given a choice of several biomorph offspring of the current genetic champion, each representing a single mutation of one of the champion's nine genes.
2001 S. Hawking Universe in Nutshell vi. 162 (caption) Computer-generated biomorphs that evolved in a program devised by the biologist Richard Dawkins.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, November 2010; most recently modified version published online December 2021).
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n.1895