In 2011 the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology established the David L. Hull Prize to commemorate the life and legacy of David Hull, who exemplified both a high standard of interdisciplinary scholarship and exemplary service that helped to build bridges among our disciplines. This biennial prize honors extraordinary scholarship and service promoting connections among the communities represented by our Society.
For this purpose, the 2025 David L. Hull Prize Committee, comprised of Rachel Ankeny, Maria Elice de Brzezinski Prestes, Pierre-Olivier Méthot, Marsha Richmond, and Gregory Radick (Chair), launched a call for the prize in November 2024. The Committee emphasized that nominees may be at any career stage, and strongly suggested that members took into account diversity when considering nominations. The deadline for nominations was February 15, 2025. On behalf of the Society, we awarded this year’s prize to Professor Mary Pickard or — as she is better known — Polly Winsor, emeritus professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto.
No one has done more than Polly Winsor to make the history of taxonomy a central, conceptually lively topic for historians of biology as well as for philosophers and scientists concerned to draw lessons about natural kinds and classification from the actual scientific past as distinct from polemical myths about it. Formally and informally, she has been an exceptionally effective and generous mentor of junior scholars, from her days as the graduate supervisor for the likes of Peter Bowler, Sharon Kingsland, Gordon McOuat, Jamie Elwick, Sara Scharf and Keynyn Brysse, through her decades of association both with the Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of Biology and with our own society, right through to the present, as a number of current and recent PhD students can attest. Although she has been retired from Toronto for over twenty years, this period has seen a remarkable burst of creativity in her scholarship, when she has not only put paid to the idea that “essentialism” dominated monolithically from Plato to Darwin but published, among other things, a three-part dialogue on the notion of “affinity” and a re-interpretation of the place of extinction in Darwin’s evolutionary theorizing.
A longtime Canadian citizen — and so the first Canadian winner of the Hull Prize, as well as its second female recipient, — she was born in New York City, graduating with a BA in the history of science from Harvard in 1965, then going on to complete her PhD in History of Science and Medicine at Yale in 1971. She was fortunate in her own mentors, working first with Everett Mendelsohn at Harvard, and then with Derek de Solla Price, Leonard Wilson and Frederic Holmes at Yale. She was also fortunate, as she tells it, in being at the right place at the right time when the Toronto Institute went looking for a new lecturer. To quote from a recent email to me: “Back then the procedure was just the IHPST's Director picking up the phone and asking the heads of the few PhD programs who's available. I had only written one chapter of my dissertation so was hired as Lecturer; when classes ended I finished writing it in the summer of 1970 at the good Museum of Comparative Zoology library, where I met Stephen Jay Gould, who needed a house-sitter while he went off researching snails.”
That finished dissertation, on how early-nineteenth-century naturalists had dealt with taxonomic complexities in the group that Cuvier had designated the Radiata, in turn became the basis for her first book, Starfish, Jellyfish, and the Order of Life: Issues in Nineteenth Century Science, published by Yale University Press in 1976, and hailed by Frederick Churchill in his review in the Journal of the History of Biology for its success in “distill[ing] the philosophical spirits out of what has appeared to others as a bland and unnourishing mash.” A second book, on the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, followed in 1991: Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum, published by the University of Chicago Press, and offering both a meticulous reconstruction of the life of a major museum and a meditation on the relation between taxonomic science and the institutions that make it possible. Since then, as noted, has come a series of papers of remarkable range and quality.
Over the arc of her long career, Polly Winsor has not only gone from strength to strength but has consistently enlarged the scope and ambition of her work, in ways that make her not only one of the most consistently exciting and illuminating historians of biology writing today but a model for the rest of us. The 2025 David L. Hull Prize is fitting recognition for her inspiring,
Greg Radick, Chair of the Hull Prize Committee