The Marjorie Grene Prize is awarded every two years for the best manuscript based on a presentation at one of the two previous ISHPSSB meetings by someone who was, at the time of presentation, a graduate student. The prize is named after Marjorie Grene both because her work in the history and philosophy of biology exemplifies the strong spirit of interdisciplinary work fundamental to ISHPSSB, and because 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.
For the 2021 Prize, the Committee received a total of 24 submissions. The committee was pleased by the variety of methodological approaches and topics covered and the high quality of the submissions. Out of this strong field emerged two submissions that the committee unanimously elected as joint winners: This year’s Marjorie Grene Prize is awarded jointly to Ariel Jonathan Roffé and Kate Nicole Hoffmann.
Kate Nicole Hoffmann
The Grene prize is also awarded to Kate Nicole Hoffmann for her paper “Subjective Experience in Explanations of Animal PTSD Behaviour”, which was presented at the 2019 ISHPSSB meeting in Oslo. A revised version of the paper, is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Topics on “Understanding Non-Human Consciousness”. Hoffmann is a third year PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, currently working on a dissertation about conceptions of nature.
In her beautifully structured paper, Hoffman makes clever and effective appeal to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (‘The DSM’) to argue that criteria used to diagnose humans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are met by animals, including chimpanzees, elephants, and others, who can be diagnosed as suffering from such symptoms. Hoffman draws on the uniqueness of PTSD and its diagnostic criteria in the DSM, in that its functional profile requires a conscious experience in the form of subjective horror or terror, to support her argument. She shows that the animal cases she considers pass a diagnostic threshold more substantially than even in some clear cases of humans who have been convincingly diagnosed with PTSD. She compellingly argues that these convincing cases of attribution of subjective experiences to animals suffering PTSD offer strong grounds for accepting the thesis that animals have conscious minds in virtue of having subjective experience. This engaging paper is a model of the kind of paper that, after reading it, leaves the reader wondering how they could have thought otherwise.
Kate Nicole Hoffmann, joint 2021 Marjorie Grene Prize recipient
Ariel Jonathan Roffé
It is awarded to Ariel Jonathan Roffé for his paper “Dynamic Homology and Circularity in Cladistic Analysis” which was presented at the 2019 ISHPSSB meeting in Oslo. A revised version of the paper, was published online in the journal Biology & Philosophy in 2020. Dr Roffé has graduated in 2020 from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. His current affiliations are the University of Buenos Aires and the Center of Studies of Philosophy and History of Science of the National University of Quilmes, where he holds a postdoctoral scholarship. In a very clear and highly effective argument, Ariel Roffé’s paper on dynamic homology exemplifies excellent close philosophical analysis with sensitivity to historical problem context. Roffé analyzes a circularity charge against traditional cladistic analysis and the claim that newer dynamic homology approaches avoid this charge. The paper clearly presents traditional maximum parsimony methods in cladistics with an excellent balance between depth and breadth of illustrations before going on to expertly characterize contemporary and technically sophisticated dynamic homology methods. The circularity charge arises from the idea that phylogenetic analysis takes common ancestry to explain the presence of homologous traits, but also that homologies are defined as those traits derived from a common ancestor. Dynamic homology is taken to depend only on nucleotides as molecular characters, so that only ‘Owenian’, pre-evolutionary, ‘primary’ homology or functional similarity of nucleotide states are assumed, leaving inference of ‘Darwinian’ evolutionary or ‘secondary’ homology as an outcome of the analysis and thus not circular. The argument turns on the technical point that dynamic homology permits cladistic analysis without pre-alignment of sequences, which are instead aligned dynamically by the analysis. This is what appears to get dynamic homology off the hook from circularity charges. After an admirably clear presentation of dynamic homology, Roffé convincingly argues that cladistic practice within the dynamic framework presupposes a form of prior homology judgment after all, but at the higher level of homology of whole sequences in order to render molecular nucleotide character states comparable in the first place. So, dynamic homology does not escape the circularity charge after all.
On behalf of ISHPSSB, I am pleased to award the 2021 Grene Prize to Ariel Jonathan Roffé and Kate Nicole Hoffmann.
Sabina Leonelli, Chair of the Marjorie Grene and Werner Callebaut Prize Committees 2019–2021