President’s Update

Ana Barahona, President

Dear colleagues,

Some important things have happened since I last wrote for the President's Corner.

As you know David Hull passed away on August 11 of this year at the age of 75. He is going to be missed immensely by us all. He was a great leader and an inspiration to our Society in many ways. Not only were his contributions to the field of history, philosophy and social studies of biology enormous, but his kind and warm personality made many of us feel proud of being his students, colleagues and/or friends. He supported many people throughout his life, and personally, I feel very grateful to have had a supportive friend and colleague.

David Hull is very well known for his contributions to the history, philosophy and social studies of biology, and was one of the founding fathers of ISH. To acknowledge his outstanding career, the Council has received with great happiness a proposal to establish the David L. Hull Prize for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology, signed by all the Past-Presidents the Society has had. After a brief discussion, the Council approved the motion unanimously, hoping that with this Prize we can keep his memory alive.

As a result of the above mentioned the Council created the Hull Prize Committee in accordance with the By-Laws. Those included in this committee are the five most recent Past-Presidents, along with other distinguished members of our Society.

I would like to take this opportunity to bring to your attention the fact that the Society is now open for donations. The Past-Presidents have made a significant contribution to the funding of the Prize and I would like to invite all those who feel so inclined to do the same to please contact Lisa Gannett, our treasurer.

The first Hull Prize Medal will be awarded at our next meeting in Utah, July 2011. Please take a look at the Call for Nominations for this Prize below.

Turning to other issues, let me tell you that we had a successful off-year workshop on “Integrating Complexity: Environment and History” at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. The workshop included researchers from many different fields to address challenging conceptual and methodological questions. According to the organizers “this workshop continued the ISHPSSB off-year tradition of ́future directions in biology studies ́ by placing a bet: whatever their precise direction, such studies will tend to be more and more interdisciplinary”. Please see the extensive report below.

Our next meeting is coming soon. If you are undecided about attending or participating, or about the topic you plan to share, this is the perfect time to make plans for this important future event. You can check the Call for Papers and Posters that is posted on our web page and pasted below. There you will find comments on audience, posters and themes, the deadline for the final call for papers and posters, the policy on multiple participation and the guidelines for submission. We are looking forward to seeing you in Utah!

Finally, please take a look at the Call for proposals to host the 2013 Meeting and the Call for Papers for the Marjorie Grene Prize, also check Lisa Gannett ́s information about the student travel support for Utah 2011. Important as it is, Roberta Millstein invites you to get involved in YOUR Society.

The 2011 ISHPSSB David Hull Prize Competition

ISHPSSB seeks nominations for the 2011 David L. Hull Prize for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology. As our President, Ana Barahona has just announced, the David L. Hull Prize honors an extraordinary contribution to scholarship and service that promotes interdisciplinary connections between history, philosophy, social studies, and biology. In the spirit of David Hull’s own service to the profession and his support for the contributions the advancement of people at early stages of their careers, the Prize is not restricted to recognition of a lifetime of achievement, but may be awarded to individuals at any stage of their career to acknowledge and promote significant efforts they have made that combine scholarship and service.

It is appropriate to name this prize in honor of David Hull, a former president of our society who set a very high standard of interdisciplinary scholarship in his scholarly work, but also did important leg work to help found the philosophy of biology and worked tirelessly to build bridges among our disciplines. He served as President of three very different societies (ISHPSSB (1991–1992), the Philosophy of Science Association (1985–6), and the Society of Systematic Zoologists (1984–5)), performed a great deal of service for these and a number of other societies, and did a great deal to foster the publication of interesting work in all of our disciplines. Among other things, David served for 21 years as General Editor of the University of Chicago Press Series in the Conceptual Foundations of Science and as a member of about 15 editorial boards of journals and encyclopedias. David was a staunch and proud advocate of gay rights who brought the virtues of advocacy to his professional life. He always sought to help those to whom doors were closed and was especially noteworthy for the many ways in which he assisted people at the beginning their careers, helping them, inter alia, to overcome any barriers put in their way and to improve their publications even when their viewpoints were strongly contrary to his own.

Winners of the David L. Hull Prize will receive a medal in honor of their contributions to scholarship and service. We anticipate that the first medal will be awarded at the 2011 meeting in Salt Lake City.

A complete nomination package will consist of two letters of nomination each signed by at least one member of ISHPSSB and a current curriculum vitae of the candidate. Because of the late announcement this year, the deadline for nominations will be 1 January, 2011; in future we anticipate that the deadline will be 1 July, approximately one year before the next annual meeting of ISHPSSB. The nomination package must be sent to the Chair of the Committee, either by email with attachments (preferred) or by ordinary post. The address to which to send nominations is at the end of this announcement.

The David L. Hull Prize Committee for 2011 consists of:

  • Richard M. Burian, Chair This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Garland Allen This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Lindley Darden This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Michael Dietrich This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.;
  • Jean Gayon This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Jim Griesemer This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • V. Betty Smocovitis This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Michel Morange This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Maria Jesús Santesmases This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Nominations should be mailed to Richard Burian either at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or to:

Richard M. Burian
Chair, Hull Prize Committee
Department of Philosophy - 0126 Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24060
USA

Call for Papers and Sessions

ISHPSSB Program Co-Chairs Chris Young and Mark Largent hope you are already thinking about papers and sessions for the 2011 meeting in Salt Lake City.

To be sure you are getting the most up-to-date information about the meeting, subscribe to the ISHPSSB listserv by clicking on the “Listserv” link at www.ishpssb.org

ISHPSSB officers have set up a bulletin board where you can suggest a session, or review sessions that have been proposed so far. For now, only members can post on this bulletin board, so you might check on your membership status and then start sharing ideas. The bulletin board link is http://ishpssb.onefireplace.com/

Our expectation for the Salt Lake City meeting is that we will have more cross-disciplinary sessions than ever before. In addition, we expect that all sessions will be geared toward wider audiences. This was a major thrust of the discussions that came out of the Brisbane meeting in 2009. Every scholar has numerous meetings in which to present work to her or his peers: historians speaking to historians, philosophers speaking to philosophers, sociologists speaking to sociologists, and biologists from across the spectrum speaking to biologists within their specialty. ISHPSSB is uniquely situated to provide us the opportunity to talk to each other, across disciplinary boundaries, about biology studies. In order for this to happen, we need to think broadly about each other as an audience. We hope you will begin now to look for ways of collaborating.

A new feature of the program for 2011 will be a poster session. Please view the separate Call for Posters by following the link at: http:// ishpssb.org/meeting.html

Presenters should think about ways their work will potentially connect to other sessions throughout the meeting. We hope this can be accomplished by thinking about the larger themes that are illuminated by your work. These themes are meant to be broad and overlapping, but will help to provide benchmarks for organizing sessions as well as signposts for people at the conference seeking out areas of inquiry. Some themes we have identified include: Civic engagement; Race; Policy, science funding, and scientific progress; Sustainability, environment, energy, and economics; Gender and LGBT; Genetic testing; Evo-Devo; and Education. Details about several of these themes can be found on the bulletin board, and more will be posted as we move forward. Please note that not all papers and sessions are expected to fit into one of the themes, and we hope that as we see work that pushes beyond these categories we can all be more aware of the new directions scholars and members of ISHPSSB are taking.

Of course, we welcome sessions in all areas of our fields; individual paper submissions are also welcome. The basic time unit for sessions will be 90 minutes. As soon as the registration pages are up and running, you may submit a freestanding paper proposal. This should happen in late November. Until then, we encourage you to be looking for colleagues throughout the world who will complement your work in a session. We would like this to be a productive time for identifying collaborators. During this time, we encourage scholars to comment on the specific themes described above. You may contribute to this discussion online using the ISHPSSB bulletin board. If you would like to suggest a theme that will strengthen our multi-disciplinary and cross-session collaboration, please contact Chris Young and Mark Largent at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The deadline for paper proposals will be February 28, 2011. We hope you will be checking back regularly on the bulletin board to identify how your work may connect with other potential proposals.

Please also keep in mind the ISHPSSB policy on multiple participation: no one may present in more than one session; exceptions are made for those who organize another session, comment in another session, or give a short plenary address. Individuals may serve more than one function in a given session, e.g., chair and presenter. In addition to these roles, individuals may also present a poster in the poster session.

If you have questions about your session or paper idea, or about procedures, please contact the Program Co-Chairs, Chris Young and Mark Largent: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Chris Young, Department of Biology, PO Box 343922, Alverno College, Milwaukee, WI 53234; (414) 298-9138.

ISHPSSB would like to encourage sessions that:

  1. combine more than one disciplinary perspective;
  2. include participants from more than one institution and/or nation;
  3. promote the interaction of junior and senior scholars, including students.

Program guidelines include:

  1. The program co-chairs, in consultation with the program committee, and consistent with site constraints, will organize a rich, diverse, and high quality program.
    While it is the intention of the Society to be as inclusive as possible, the program co-chairs have the discretion to reject papers or sessions that are truly inappropriate for these meetings or that do not meet basic standards of communication. The program committee is available to assist the program co-chairs in judging borderline cases.
  2. No one may present in more than one session. An exception is made for those who organize another session, comment in another session, or give a short plenary address. Individuals may serve more than one function in a given session, e.g. chair and presenter.
  3. Each regular session must have a minimum of three presenters.
  4. Multiple sessions on a given topic should be identified with titles that distinguish the particular focus of each session, rather than merely serialize the topic.
  5. All accepted participants must pre-register for the conference in order to be included in the program.

Members of the 2011 Program Committee include:

  • Callebaut, Werner This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Millstein, Roberta This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Santesmases, María Jesús This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Suárez, Edna This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Stotz, Karola This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • El-Hani, Charbel This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Largent, Mark (co-chair) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Young, Chris (co-chair) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Call for Posters

ISHPSSB Program Co-Chairs Chris Young and Mark Largent hope you are already thinking about papers and sessions for the 2011 meeting in Salt Lake City.

To be sure you are getting the most up-to-date information about the meeting, subscribe to the ISHPSSB listserv by clicking on the “Listserv” link at www.ishpssb.org

This will be a dynamic setting for scholars to present their work in progress as well as expand on the implications of work completed in an interactive setting. The program co-chairs are actively soliciting posters from a wide range of scholars, providing for interaction among all participants. This setting will engage biologists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers alike. Our local arrangements team is providing a comfortable setting with refreshments readily available.

Posters are always useful in broadening the participation of scholars. We expect to see graduate students as well as experienced scholars presenting and participating in the poster sessions. A time in the program will be dedicated to the poster session. During this time, creative presentations are encouraged.

Although less common in meetings of historians and philosophers, poster sessions are a standard venue for biologists, social scientists, and educators, where scholars regularly present their work. Of special note, a poster session offers the possibility of far more time to engage in dialogue with others about one's work than a regular session does.

At ISHPSSB 2011 in Salt Lake City, scholars who are presenting a paper will also be allowed to present a poster, if proposals are submitted and accepted for both formats. In particular, posters that represent work that is in very early stages may be accepted for the meeting, and the ensuing dialogue may be most valuable to a scholar developing a new project.

As soon as the registration pages are up and running, you may submit a freestanding paper proposal. This should happen in late November. The deadline for poster proposals will be February 28, 2011. We hope you will be checking back regularly on the bulletin board to identify how your work may connect with other potential proposals.

Please also keep in mind the ISHPSSB policy on multiple participation: no one may present in more than one session; exceptions are made for those who organize another session, comment in another session, or give a short plenary address. Individuals may serve more than one function in a given session, e.g., chair and presenter. In addition to these roles, individuals may also present a poster in the poster session. If you have questions about your poster idea, or about procedures, please contact the Program Co-Chairs, Chris Young and Mark Largent: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Chris Young, Department of Biology, PO Box 343922, Alverno College, Milwaukee, WI 53234; (414) 298-9138.

Members of the 2011 Program Committee include:

  • Callebaut, Werner This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Millstein, Roberta This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Santesmases, María Jesús This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Suárez, Edna This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Stotz, Karola This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • El-Hani, Charbel This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Largent, Mark (co-chair) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  • Young, Chris (co-chair) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Call for Proposals to Host the 2013 Meeting

It is the time to start planning for the 2013 ISHPSSB meeting. The first step is to decide on a location. The Site Selection Committee invites members

who would be interested in having their institution host the meeting, to present a proposal to by February 15th 2011, or preferably sooner. Proposals should include a general description of the institutional site, availability of housing (dorms, hotels, etc) and meeting rooms (large lecture halls for plenary sessions and enough smaller classrooms for individual sessions), details of the administrative support that will be available to the conference organizers, details of any funding that the organizers will be able to raise to support the meeting, availability of transportation (both internationally and locally), and other features (local activities, scenery etc) that would make the location attractive.

Please send suggestions directly to me, Paul Griffiths, via e-mail to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or mail to Department of Philosophy and Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science, A14, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.

Marjorie Grene Prize Call for Papers

ISHPSSB seeks submissions for the 2011 Marjorie Grene Prize. This prize is intended to advance the careers of younger scholars, and will be awarded to the best manuscript based on a presentation at one of the two previous ISHPSSB meetings (Exeter 2007 or Brisbane 2009) by someone who was, at the time of presentation, a graduate student.

It is very appropriate for ISHPSSB to name this prize in Marjorie Grene's honor. Not only did her work in the history and philosophy of biology exemplify the strong spirit of interdisciplinary work fundamental to ISHPSSB, but she played a central role in bringing together diverse scholars of biology even before the formation of the Society. She was a valued mentor to many members of the Society and a long-standing inspiration to all.

The award will consist of a certificate and an award of $500.

Submissions should be in the form of a paper prepared for submission to a professional journal, with an indication of the journal in question and whether the paper is already in review. Submissions can be in the form of papers already accepted for publication. Electronic submissions, in Microsoft Word or PDF format, are preferred and must be emailed no later than March 1, 2011. Hardcopy submissions must include three complete copies of the paper and be mailed no later than March 1, 2011.

The winning entry will be announced by May 1, 2011.

Please submit papers to:

Tara Abraham, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.;Department of History, University of Guelph,Guelph, ONN1G 2W1CANADA.

ISHPSSB off-year Workshop Report

Trevor Pearce, Gillian Barker and Mark Borello

In a lecture at Berkeley, John Dewey (1899, 129) declared that “Philosophy may not be sacrificed to the partial and superficial clamor of that which sometimes officiously and pretentiously exhibits itself as Science. But there is a sense in which philosophy must go to school to the sciences; must have no data save such as it receives at their hands; and be hospitable to no method of inquiry or reflection not akin to those in daily use among the sciences”.

Philosophers who specialize in the ways and workings of science have frequently heeded Dewey’s advice, engaging in myriad ways with the natural, social, and historical sciences. However, too often the products of history and science become ‘mere data’ for philosophers, producing a loveless “marriage of convenience” (Kuhn 1977; Burian 1977).

For the fourth biennial ISHPSSB off-year workshop, “Integrating Complexity: Environment and History” (ICEH), we tried to recapture the spirit of Dewey’s time, when historians, philosophers, anthropologists, biologists, and psychologists together discussed the problems of life, mind, morality, development, and evolution. We chose as our main workshop theme “integrating complexity” – just as organisms are complex integrations of diverse parts, the workshop was to be a coming together of researchers from many different fields to address challenging conceptual and methodological questions. Thus, the 2010 workshop continued the ISHPSSB off-year tradition of “future directions in biology studies” by placing a bet: whatever their precise direction, such studies will tend to be more and more interdisciplinary.

The workshop was sponsored by the Joseph L. Rotman Institute for Science and Values, the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario (UWO), as well as by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It was organized, under the guidance of Gillian Barker, by a committee of faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students working in the Rotman Institute at UWO. Our fundraising enabled us to invite a wonderful lineup of plenary speakers from many disciplines: History, Anthropology, Philosophy, Psychology, Economics, and Engineering. Moreover, all participants attended interdisciplinary panels, one each day, on (1) human immunology, (2) the causes of evolution, (3) evolutionary developmental biology, and (4) historical sciences. About a third of these panelists were working biologists.

The conference kicked off with two lectures about Charles Darwin, a man who is hard to avoid at such events. Robert Richards argued that Darwin thought of natural selection as a process suffused with intention and purpose, while Frank Egerton reviewed some of the important ecological discoveries of Darwin’s famous voyage on the Beagle. Highlights of subsequent days included Emily Schultz’s historical survey of ecological and environmental anthropology; Harry Heft’s discussion of Edwin Holt, Roger Barker, and studies of organism-environment interaction in psychology; and George Smith’s demonstration that there are deep analogies between (a) the process of failure analysis in engineering and (b) the reconstruction of the past in the historical sciences. The final speaker was Elliott Sober, who argued that although it is often possible to infer whether common ancestry is more likely than separate ancestry given present traits, our information about the past is always decreasing.

As with past ISHPSSB off-year workshops, one of our primary goals was to include graduate students and other younger scholars. This was achieved by daily parallel breakout sessions, inspired by those at the 2006 off-year workshop at Indiana University – Bloomington. Speakers presented on topics ranging from Lamarck and Buffon to niche construction and model organisms, with fifteen-minute talks followed by twenty minutes of discussion. For example, Peter Gildenhuys presented a variety of extended population genetics models that are able to capture different aspects of organism-environment interaction; and Jessica Bolker drew a helpful distinction between ‘exemplary’ and ‘surrogate’ model organisms, i.e., those that exemplify a group and those that stand in for another organism.

Last but not least, we held the traditional ‘happy office hours’ each evening before dinner – this is a time in which graduate students have a chance to have a drink and converse with junior and senior faculty from a variety of institutions and disciplines. These animated discussions usually continued into dinner and beyond, facilitated by the fact that almost all workshop participants stayed on site at the Spencer Ivey Leadership Centre.

Thus the fourth biennial ISHPSSB off-year workshop was a resounding success, providing the ideal environment for a discussion of complex biological issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. We should try to foster more such interdisciplinary events; for as Dewey (1898, 339) saw so clearly, we must not only adapt to current conditions, but also seek out and create new

conditions and possibilities: change almost always stems from the “discovery and constitution of new environments.”

You are Ishkabibble!*

Roberta Millstein

One of the things that makes Ishkabibble distinctive as a Society is the extent to which it is member-driven:

  • Ishkabibble has numerous committees that the general membership can serve on.
  • Every conference features an all-members meeting, where members hear committee reports and vote on various proposals, including the choice of site for subsequent conferences.
  • Members can organize sessions at conferences. (If you seek others with similar interests, post your ideas to the bulletin boards for the upcoming conference at http:// ishpssb.onefireplace.com/ )
  • All the officers are volunteers who work without staff and without compensation; they are just members like you.

In other words, this is YOUR society. Get involved!

 * The proper way to pronounce "ISHPSSB".

Nominations for Officers and Council Members

Jim Griesemer

ISH Nominations Are Underway!

The Nominations Committee (Marion Blute, Richard Burian, Jean Gayon, Staffan Müller-Wille, and Betty Smocovitis, Jim Griesemer, Chair) is beginning the process of preparing a slate of candidates for election to officer and council positions in ISHPSSB. The specific positions that we will be seeking to fill are four Council positions, President-elect, Secretary, Treasurer, and the Program Chair(s). Our schedule is as follows: We will have a preliminary slate of nominees to mail out to the general membership by early March. We put this slate together by sending suggestions, with a brief explanation of why the person would be a good candidate for the position, to the committee as a whole. Once we get a preliminary slate together, in early March we will send out the preliminary slate to the general membership, asking for any additional nominations. Two members are required at this stage for any nomination to become official. The members doing the nominating will also need to secure the nominee's permission. The Nominations Committee then assembles a final ballot to be mailed (electronically) to the entire membership no more than 100 days before the next meeting. The Bylaws also state that we provide members with a minimum of 30 days to respond. If members think that more than 30 days should be allowed for voting, please let the Committee know (Jim Griesemer can be reached at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).

At this point no action is required by any member. But we do want to alert you to the nominations and election schedule. Be thinking of people who might serve the Society in one of the positions listed above, and feel free to send any suggestions to members of the Nominations Committee at any time.

Travel Support Committee

Lisa Gannett

ISHPSSB supports travel to its biennial meeting for graduate students based on funding available through memberships and donations to the society. This past summer, ISHPSSB joined with HSS and several other history, philosophy, and social studies of science and technology societies in an application to NSF for travel funding for meetings held from 2011 to 2015. We expect to hear the outcome soon.

For the upcoming meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, procedures for graduate student members to apply for travel funds will be posted on the meeting web page: http:// www.ishpssb.org/meeting.html. You will need to support your application with a best-available fare quote, expected amount of institutional funding, and supporting email from your advisor. The deadline for applications is April 15, 2011.

Existing policies and procedures for student travel can be found at http://www.ishpssb.org/operations/ travel_comm.html. Please send any recommendations for changes to one of the current committee members:

Lisa Gannett (Chair), Rachael Brown, Linnda Caporael, Berris Charnley, Don Goodman-Wilson, and Gregory Radick.

Please consider donating to the travel fund when you renew your membership, or at other times, donate via PayPal on our membership page, http://www.ishpssb.org/ membership.html, or by mailing a check to Roberta Millstein, ISHPSSB Secretary, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis, One Shields Ave, Davis, CA 95616-8673, USA.