D'Arcy Thompson's 'On Growth and Form' is worth a read.

As a lapsed biologist, I would say he's right that in biology, shape results from the interaction of physical forces and the properties of materials. But he misses the point that the properties of materials are governed by genes. There's no gene that makes a sea urchin spherical, but there are genes such make its skin flexible but inelastic (or whatever), and it's spherical because of that. Evolution is perfectly happy to form the shape indirectly by selecting alleles of those genes. But a notional anti-Thompson who thinks genes are everything would be missing the point that lots of shapes are impossible, because there's no plausible combination of force and material which would produce them.