Newsletter Volume 23 No. 1 Issue 43 (Fall 2011)

President's Note

The Autumn Newsletter finds me looking back with a warm glow on our summer meeting in Salt Lake City - and still wearing my conference T-shirt with that fantastic interpretation of Utahceratops. Thanks to the hard work of Matt Haber and Jim Tabery and the generous support of our sponsors* this was surely one of the finest meetings to date. In the post-conference survey 90% of us rated the meeting as either 'excellent' or 'very good'.

Over four hundred and twenty five people from twenty four countries registered for the meeting, and there were over four hundred items in the program. It was good to see so many up and coming young scholars at the meeting, many of them aided by the student travel fund. Thanks to all members who made contributions to the fund when renewing their membership, and please keep those donations coming! Matt and Jim also did a great job in keeping the fees for the meeting low and providing affordable options for accommodation and dining.

A new feature of the meeting was a poster session. This allowed us to reduce the number of parallel sessions, and gave the twenty-seven poster presenters the chance to present their work to the whole meeting. I hope we can do this again at future meetings.

Another successful addition to the meeting was a public outreach forum on Evolution, Gender & Sexuality, held in Salt Lake City's spectacular downtown public library, and featuring University of Utah's Lisa Diamond and long-standing ISHPSSB members Elizabeth Lloyd and John Dupré. The large auditorium was filled by a good mix of conference attendees and members of the public, and the talks were followed by a lively question and answer session.

The 2011 Marjorie Grene Prize for the best graduate student paper at either of the previous two meetings was awarded to Angela Potochnik, and you can read about her prize winning essay below. We also awarded, for the first time, the David Hull Medal, an award made in honour of the late David L. Hull to an individual who has made extraordinary contributions to scholarship and service in ways that promote interdisciplinary connections between history, philosophy, social studies, and biology and that foster the careers of younger scholars. The inaugural recipient was the distinguished historian of biology William B. Provine, and the citation for his award is reproduced below.

The award ceremony was also a chance to remember David's passing. David's friends and longstanding members of the society Jane Maienschein, Richard Burian, Christopher Horvath, Robert J. Richards, Elisabeth Lloyd, and Ana Barahona told us something of David's long career and his many contributions to integrating the history, philosophy and social studies of biology, to supporting younger scholars, and to the struggle for equal treatment for gay and lesbian people. Three of these memorials to David are reproduced here, and we hope to print the remainder in the Spring Newsletter. Several other members took the opportunity to share their memories of David, and particularly of his generosity to them when they were junior scholars. It was a moving occasion and our thanks go to all who took part.

At the Members Meeting we had a chance to welcome in the new officers of the society, including myself, and more importantly to thank outgoing President Ana Barahona and her team for their work over the past two years. We also voted enthusiastically to endorse the proposal to host the 2013 biennial meeting in Montpellier, France, as you can read later in the Newsletter. I am looking forward to it already!

Paul Griffiths

(*) We extend our thanks to the many sponsors of the 2011 Biennial Meeting of ISHPSSB: University of Utah Office of the Vice President for Research; University of Utah Brain Institute; University of Utah Division of Medical Ethics and Humanities; University of Utah Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center; University of Utah College of Humanities; University of Utah Asia Center; University of Utah Environmental Humanities; University of Utah Department of Philosophy; The Natural History Museum of Utah; University of Utah Gender Studies; University of Utah Department of Anthropology; Equality Utah; University of Utah Latin American Studies.

ISHPSSB 2013 Montpellier

A welcome from Jean Gayon & Philippe Huneman, local organizers.

We are happy to welcome all of you to Montpellier for the next ISHPSSB meeting, July 8-12 2013. Montpellier is a Mediterranean city, capital of the Languedoc-Roussillon, a region in the south of France, very close to the seashore.

It is a middle size city, easy to travel around, either with buses and tramways, or simply walking. It is easily accessible from Europe, Australia and America: 1 hour from Paris by plane, with many flights every day, from regular and low-cost airlines, and connections to major European cities. It is 3.30 hours from Paris with the high speed train (TGV). It also enjoys a nice warm and dry summer weather.

For anyone interested in the history or philosophy of the life sciences, Montpellier is a perfect city to meet for many reasons. It is a city with a long and rich tradition in Medicine and natural history: the oldest Faculté de Médecine in France still hosted in its initial buildings (see picture above); the vitalist school of Medicine, flourishing in the 18th century, etc. The city holds the oldest botanical garden of France and one of the oldest in Europe associated with a famous herbarium. Today it is the most important European research site in ecological and environmental sciences, agronomy and ecology (over 2300 researchers), with dozens of research teams in these disciplines, and many types of equipments. Many of these institutions expressed their interest in welcoming the ISHPSSB Conference.

Biologists from the area will be glad to attend the meetings and present some of their work in symposia, which will give all of us chances to learn about of the biology done here and allow for fruitful interactions. Moreover, they will be happy to show you some places of particular interests, and are planning visits for us to the Museum of the History of Medicine, and the exceptional Ecotron equipment (one of the three in Europe) used to set ecological experiments.

The conference will be primarily organized by the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (IHPST, CNRS/Université Pantheon Sorbonne. www-ihpst.univ-paris1.fr), an institution which includes a strong team in history and philosophy of biology. This team, made of faculty, post-docs and PhD students, will be strongly invested in supporting the conference. The local organization committee also involves the Université Montpellier III, with the partnership of Agropolis International (www.agropolis.fr), a networking structure specialized in organising and promoting events in the environmental sciences. Through this structure, as well as through the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, www.cnrs.fr) of which the IHPST is a part, we hope to have significant funding at local and national scales, so that we can keep registration fees quite low. Wishing to host a meeting as friendly as possible in the spirit of the previous meetings, we will also pay special attention to social events, finding a nice place to host the society banquet, with a quite low cost in order to maximize the diversity of the participants.

The meeting will be held in the Supagro school, which is a modern campus with all facilities for conferences, and includes a student residence with 200 rooms, providing rooms at a 22€/night cost, so that we expect the minimal cost per day of accommodation & food to be around 50€. Montpellier being a city of Universities, two other equivalent student residencies are available around, able to host all our attendees. Nice hotels with a wide range of prices are to be found in the city center (with negotiated discounts), which is situated 20 minutes from the campus.

Within the city, you will enjoy the beautiful setting of a downtown with a rich history, experience varieties of provençal cuisine, as well as the diversity and sophistication of the local wines, the Languedoc Roussillon being a country of vineyards.

Finally, there are many reasons to extend your stay in order to experience the richness of the Languedoc area: nearby you will find plenty of beautiful landscapes and settings along the sea shore, like the beach of Palavas les Flots (30 min by bus) or the beautiful old harbor of Sète, as well as in the hinterlands where small Occitan villages, various types of vegetations and hiking trails are easily found. The famous Pont du Gard, a roman aqueduct, as well as the roman cities of Nîmes and Arles with their archaeological remains, are in the vicinity. Further afield you can move either west to Barcelona and the Catalonian country (Spain), or east to Marseille, Provence and the French Riviera.

We have no doubt that for each of you there will be many treasures in Montpellier and around which will fit your taste and expectations.

Call for 2013 off-year workshop proposals

The ISHPSSB Off-Year Workshop Committee invites proposals for off-year meetings for 2012. ISHPSSB has sanctioned off-year workshops since 2004, and these meetings have become an important part of the Society's operations. Proposals will be accepted on a rolling basis and should be sent to Andrew Hamilton (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), who is also available to answer questions about the proposal selection process.

In keeping with the history of the off-year workshop and the goals of serving student interests and developing students into active and capable contributors to the Society, the Committee has a preference for workshop proposals that are conceived by graduate students and that describe meetings organized and run primarily by graduate students. The Committee also prefers proposals that offer a clearly articulated mission and vision for approaching a particular topic, problem, challenge, or theme. The Committee is also interested in new ideas for meeting formats, and encourages proposers to design meetings in whatever way best fits their goals. ISHPSSB imposes few constraints on the shape of off-year workshops, so workshops in this cycle need not resemble past workshops with respect to organization, format, or choice of theme.

Proposers should note that ISHPSSB does not offer financial support for off-year workshops, but that some funding for graduate students who are members of the Society may be available.

In order to be considered, proposals must meet the following broad requirements:

• Meetings must be interdisciplinary, including at least the disciplines of history, philosophy, and social studies of biology.
• Meetings must meet all of the requirements of the Society concerning accessibility, open access, and open invitations to members.
• Meetings must reflect the international nature of the Society.
• Meetings that are organized around a particular theme should do so in a way that appeals to the Society's membership broadly.

Complete proposals will include the following information:

1. Statement of Mission and Vision: Why is a meeting on this topic, challenge, or problem necessary, important, or timely? Why is the proposed format appropriate given the goals of the meeting?
2. Proposed Site: Why is the chosen site appropriate? What are its advantages? Is the venue accessible? (Accessibility details are available here: http://www.ishpssb.org/operations/site_selection_comm.html) Is the area well served with respect to air and ground transportation? Is the site difficult for international travelers to reach? Are there adequate housing options? Is A/V support available? Are the rooms air conditioned? Is there adequate parking?
3. Proposed Date: Are the facilities available on the dates chosen? Are there conflicts with other meetings on similar topics?
4. Proposer Name, Affiliation, and Contact Information
5. Expenses

ISHPSSB will not provide funding for off-year meetings, but the Committee will want to make sure, in the interest of the society, that costs to its members are reasonable and that the proposers have secured sufficient funding. Proposers should therefore provide actual or estimated costs for:

1. Housing options
2. Registration costs, if any
3. Parking
4. Banquet, if any
5. Total costs for participants

Proposers should also document, as best they can, that they have secured funding appropriate for the size and style of their meeting.

Citation for the Marjorie Grene Prize Awarded at the 2011 Biennial Meeting of the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology

The Marjorie Grene Prize Committee received a total of eleven submissions for the 2011 prize. All submissions were of superb quality, with over half already published or accepted for publication. Once again the committee was reminded of the creativity and talent of the more junior members of ISHPSSB, as well as the breadth of expertise that defines our society.

Angela Potochnik, currently assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, is the recipient of the 2011 Marjorie Grene Prize 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. Her submission, "Explanatory Independence and Epistemic Interdependence: A Case Study of the Optimality Approach" is an important contribution to our understanding of modelling strategies in science. In a well-argued and precise analysis, Potochnik explores the pursuit of optimality models in evolutionary and behavioural ecology, the criticisms that have been levelled against them, and the reasons for the persistence of such models. Arguing that optimality models have value as evolutionary explanations, Potochnik shows that such models have explanatory independence: they neglect certain aspects of the evolutionary process such as genetic transmission. At the same time, however, the applicability of such optimality models must be evaluated by looking beyond the dynamics represented by them—thus they are epistemically dependent on other models. Potochnik draws broad conclusions about the tension between these two features, and her paper is an original contribution to philosophical discussions about the roles of modelling in science, the nature of scientific explanation, and the constraints and complexities of scientific practice.

Tara Abraham (Chair), on behalf of the rest of the Grene Prize Committee: Gillian Barker, Kevin Elliott, Marta Halina, Greg Radick, Adam Shapiro, and V. Betty Smocovitis

Citation for the David L. Hull Prize Awarded at the 2011 Biennial Meeting of the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology

We historians of science have a tendency, following the evidence, to blur or even to reject wonderful stories that have been handed down for decades or generations. I have found it necessary to understand the history of science that is so real to scientists themselves.

Will Provine, "No Free Will," Isis, 1999

At its meeting in 2011, the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology will award the first David L. Hull Prize. This prize will be awarded biennially to honor the life and legacy of David L. Hull (1935-2010). It is to be awarded to an individual who has made extraordinary contributions to scholarship and service in ways that promote interdisciplinary connections between history, philosophy, social studies, and biology and that foster the careers of younger scholars. These are strengths that reflect the contributions of David Hull to our professions and to our society.

The inaugural recipient of the David L. Hull prize is William B. Provine, who is currently the Andrew H. and James L. Tisch Distinguished University Professor at Cornell University. It is entirely fitting that the we honor David Hull by recognizing Will Provine, whose teaching, mentoring, research, and engagement have won admiration and respect among biologists, historians, philosophers and social scientists who study biology. His teaching commitments at the undergraduate level include "Biology and Society," a formal undergraduate major he helped to institute that has inspired other similar programs around the world. His mentoring of students has been accorded exceptional praise by many of his former students, some of whom are well known in the wider world. These qualities and accomplishments were honored by Cornell University when they bestowed on him the prestigious Clark Teaching Award in 1989.

Provine's early work on the history-and sociology-of population genetics helped to create the historiography for that discipline, especially with regard to its contributions to the "modern synthesis." Provine's approach to the writing of history through close relationships with living subjects is especially striking. Once he abandoned classical Greek science, his formal area of study, he furthered his own training by interacting with biological scientists, treating them both as mentors and as subjects for analytical study. Studying closely with Richard Lewontin, then at the University of Chicago, Provine drew on his strong mathematical background to sharpen our historical understanding of the origins of theoretical population genetics with a doctoral dissertation that became his 1971 book, The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. Provine's monumental introduction to the republication of the 43 papers on the "Genetics of Natural Populations" written by Theodosius Dobzhansky and colleagues between 1935 and 1976, (edited jointly with Lewontin, John Moore, and Bruce Wallace), examines the Dobzhansky's empirical work in population genetics and his collaboration with Sewall Wright. (Five of the first fifteen papers of that series were co-authored by Wright.) Provine's introduction remains indispensable reading for anyone seeking to understand Dobzhansky's work on Drosophila and the internal dynamic of the "fly-room" during a critical formative period of the new field of evolutionary genetics, but it also highlights the role played by Wright. Another of Provine's projects (published in Studies in the History of Biology) focused on Frances Sumner; introduced scholars not only to an important biologist, but also to the importance of the deer mouse, Peromyscus, and to the combination of laboratory and field studies that played an integral role in the "new systematics."

Provine's most celebrated relationship was perhaps with the late Ernst Mayr, with whom he sparred publically as well as behind the scenes over a number of critical interpretive points that now undergird our understanding of the history of evolutionary biology. Their co-edited collection The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology, stemming from a 1974 conference, remains the entry point for all scholars interested in exploring the subject, even though it was published over 30 years ago. But the crowning achievement of Provine's novel methodology, flair for personality, and commitment to deep research and exactitude in scientific explication was his monumental 1986 book, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology. This book reset the standard in the genre known of "scientific biography." The book has earned high praise from biologists, historians of biology, and philosophers of biology. As one example, in a 1989 review, Stephen Jay Gould—no fan of the "evolutionary synthesis" or the reductionist tendencies of microevolution—called it "the finest intellectual biography available for any twentieth century evolutionist." "In its wealth of detail and richness of insight," Gould wrote, "it has established a standard for historical work in this field."

Provine entered another arena, the exploration of "biology as ideology," with two foundational articles that appeared in Science (1973) and American Zoologist (1986) demonstrating how race figured prominently in geneticists' and biologists' thinking in a critical early period of twentieth century biology. Both articles are extensively cited by historians, sociologists, anthropologists and other scholars of the social study of the biological sciences to this day.

Other close relationships with scientists included L. C. Dunn, Motoo Kimura, Tomoko Ohta, Tom Jukes, Jim Crow and especially Arthur J. Cain, with whom he published a number of papers. The trust that developed in these relationships led to their support of the historical and philosophical study of biology and led many of them to leave behind their own papers, libraries or substantive interviews that have subsequently enriched the work of other scholars.

Will Provine has an unflagging interest in getting others to appreciate the substance or the sciences he studies. He will talk to anyone about science-in the classroom, at the seminar table, but also in more unlikely places-for example in debates in front of sometimes unfriendly public audiences. He participates in such interchanges with unflagging respect and good humor. Thus, his numerous debates with creationists and anti-evolutionists, beginning with Philip Johnson in the early 1990s, established Provine's leading position in this enduring contest and culminated with his appearance in Ben Stein's notorious Expelled. But even before then, Provine's engagement with dissenting opinions had become a hallmark of his personal style, which combines an unusual mixture of respect, curiosity, contrarianism and tolerance with respect to different views and perspectives.

Provine's service to the community is therefore extensive, and far from traditional. Not one for formal offices or organizations, he has instead been a facilitator for people and has been especially encouraging to junior scholars. Early on he began to undertake oral history interviews with major figures reluctant to accept such attention, like Barbara McClintock before she got the Nobel Prize, sharing the results freely with other scholars. His famous library of reprint collections-approximately four-hundred-thousand in all, garnered from the trusted friendships with scientists like Ernst Caspari, Norman Giles, Charles Uhl - and over 15,000 rare books, a number of which he obtained as a young man while he was a collector and bookseller of scientific works. He has shared these collegially with an international community of scholars with great ease, following up with helpful conversation, and, more than occasionally, a gourmet meal. All this treasured material for intellectual history has been donated to the Cornell Rare Book and Manuscript collections along with a bequest from Provine, to ensure that they continue to enable scholarly study and draw together scholars from several distinct communities.

A pioneering body of impeccable scholarship that has stood the test of time, a generosity of spirit balanced with a healthy dose of contrarianism, a tireless advocacy of interdisciplinarity and of academic freedom, and a record of public service in defense of evolution and its teaching, all characterize Will Provine's life-work and serve as powerful reminders of the life and legacy of David Hull. The two were good friends working to enable interdisciplinary interactions and scholarship that are the mainstay of ISHPSSB. It is thus especially fitting that Will Provine is the first recipient of the David L. Hull Prize.

Richard Burian, on behalf of the other members of the David L. Hull Prize Committee: Garland Allen, Lindley Darden, Michael Dietrich, Jean Gayon, Jim Griesemer, Michel Morange, Maria Jesús Santesmases, and Betty Smocovitis.

In Memory of David Hull: Reflections delivered at the 2011 Biennial meeting of ISHPSSB by his friends and colleagues Jane Maienschein, Robert J. Richards, and Christopher D. Horvath

Jane Maienschein

I offer a quick look at David Hull and the beginning of ISH, since he was right there from the start and played an important role in establishing the special nature and values of the Society.

When we began, we had almost as many presidents as we had words in our name. I was the first "regular" president, serving from after the meeting in London, Ontario in 1989 through the meeting at Northwestern in 1991, for which David was the local arrangements organizer. But there were many more presidents. We elected Dick Burian as the "Honorary Past President" because he had done so much to make the society possible. He and his assistant Peggy Stewart put in countless hours and invested tremendous patience to bring together different ideas into one coherent whole and then to navigate the Virginia laws to incorporate our formal existence. In addition, and also inspired by Dick, we elected Marjorie Grene and Ernst Mayr as Honorary Presidents. David Hull was elected as the first Vice President, and he became President in 1991 and through the 1993 meeting held at Brandeis.

It is amusing that a society that includes History in its title hasn't done such a great job of recording and writing its own history. Fortunately, Pam Henson is our terrific archivist and has kept the records from the beginning, so the actual record can be found. But perhaps some smart young person will set up a blog site or other way that those with memories and reflections can share those. So many people had comments after the David Hull session that it would be lovely to record the collective memory, along with the actual official record of ISH. This article, and this special newsletter collection, provide just a start.

Back to David. Let's start with that first official meeting at Northwestern. As president, it was my job to run the business meeting, and I started by twisting arms for people to attend. Most did, which is important for building a new society and getting it right. According to my records (and in retrospect, I have no idea why I recorded such things!), the meeting lasted just under twenty minutes total. We began with the rules and reports mandated by the state of Virginia. We thanked people. Then I called for new business. We had agreed that I would call on David first, though he was the only one to raise a hand immediately anyway.

David made a motion that ISHPSSB agree never to meet in any place that had sodomy (or what were often called anti-sodomy) laws. He had a list of the existing laws, which remained in place until struck down in the United States by the Supreme Court finally in 2003. He made a short but impassioned statement about why he did not wish to be part of a society that would meet in states where he would not be comfortable. David had proposed this resolution in other societies, but lamented that he had never been successful before.

The motion received an immediate second. The only discussion was along the lines of "huh, really? Do we really have such laws?" Or from one European visit: "how odd." The resolution quickly passed with no dissent, no questions, and no hesitations of the sort that the other academic organizations to which David had posed it before had raised about whether it is our role as ISH to make such "political" resolutions. David had made it clear that this was about people, about principles, and about establishing our society to support all our members. That was clear, and it really shows the values for ISH. This was the first official resolution of the Society, and its first official non-routine vote.

David said that he was amazed and proud. It gave him a special feeling about this society of which he was about to become president. David told his close friend Michael Ruse that he would not have gone to Salt Lake City for the meeting, for political reasons. Michael himself decided not to attend out of respect for David. But we should note that the organizers did a great job of making sure that ISH held true to its values. They organized a special open forum at the downtown library on "Evolution, Gender & Sexuality".I think David would have been pleased with the commitment to doing this and the successful event.

Back to the Northwestern meeting: as a large group celebrated the new society at post-meeting party at David's house, he talked about the values of the new organization. ISH is a place where everybody can come and feel included. It is a place for all of us from all those alphabet soup of disciplines or those working between and across disciplines. A place for established scholars migrating from other fields, well-known leaders in their fields, and new graduate students. A place for people to try out new ideas as well a to present more polished works. It was important to David that we not just be organizing into yet another traditional academic group that would do the same-old thing. ISH should be open, welcoming, intellectually challenging, and dynamic. It's exciting that it is!

After that first meeting, David asked what he was supposed to be doing as president. I explained that he was supposed to find the next meeting site and raise money for graduate travel, and to make sure that the program chair and committee worked to make the meeting include history and philosophy and social studies and biology, as well as being international. Somewhere along the line, David complained that the society has an idiotically long name, and there is much difference of memory about whether it was actually David you named ISH after the comedian/musician Ish Kabibble (Merwyn Bogue). David was certainly enthusiastic to have something prounceable and more sensible (??) than ISHPSSB.

As president, David made sure that the society was inclusive and felt good. He really cared about the organization and its being the right sort of place. David Hull, our first president to have died, more than anybody else embodied the values of the society. His own scholarship and his own behavior, as the other reflections here show, exemplified what we were trying to do in establishing ISH.

Then David died. His papers are at the University of Pittsburgh archives, along with collections from other important philosophers of science including Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl Hempel. Some of his books, papers, and reprints he sent to us at Arizona State, including letters and comments on the work of colleagues and students. Some of these relate to his journal editing or refereeing. He said he trusted us with them, and we will make them available to scholars, but carefully trying to do so appropriately.

As I experience each ISH meeting or off year meetings, and as I watch the officers at work, I see the values and hopes of those early years having matured. All that work that David and Dick and others invested has led us somewhere worth being. We see David's values about people and ideas, about connecting disciplines, and somehow combining to make the world better. That's David Hull's legacy, and it's powerful and important as it plays out through ISH.

Robert J. Richards

David Hull was a colleague, but more than that, he was a close friend of mine and that of my wife Barbara.

I first met David in connection with an advance contract I received for my first book. My editor, Susan Abrams, thought it should go into the series that David was editing for the University of Chicago Press. David, who had just moved from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee to Northwestern University, invited me to lunch, near his home in Chicago, to talk about my book project. As I dimly remember, we spent most of the lunch arguing about whether species were individuals, a metaphysical concept I could not understand-and still don't. It was one of those signal ideas for which David was known-he, that most unmetaphysical of philosophers.

David read that first manuscript carefully and supplied me with numerous insights, as he did for two subsequent manuscripts, also published in David's series. The third book, The Romantic Conception of Life (2002), which narrated the impact of the German Romantic movement on biology, was, I realized, not exactly David's cup of tea; he was, nonetheless, patient, if not a signatory to my point of view, which suggested to David a dark and murky well of treacherous ideas which might infect Darwinian evolution-the Intelligent Designers were bad enough.

In the early 1980s, my wife and I attended several of David's parties at his home on the near-north side of Chicago. The parties-well, one can only describe them as uninhibited and rollicking affairs.

The early 80s were also the beginning of the outbreak of AIDS, which hit the Chicago community quite hard. David's partner Richard came down with the disease. David nursed him with loving care and eventual despair. He attended to many other victims of the tragedy, seeing to their medical needs and their financial welfare. Typically of David, he also began researching the disease, which at the beginning was quite mysterious. Richard died a terrible, though fortunately swift, death. That death and the lingering deaths of others deeply and permanently affected David-he never really got over them. A certain sadness entered his life and produced an attitude that had little patience for the frequent shams of political and intellectual affairs, and that of institutions, like the Catholic Church, in which David was raised. The religious beliefs of fundamentalists simply drove David to an unquiet furry, though he always retained a profound respect for the dangerous possibilities of stupid people.

In his professional life, David united a philosopher's acuity and a historian's curiosity with the technical knowledge of a systematist in biology. David's star rose during the 1970s with the publication of two books in quick succession. The first was Darwin and his Critics, which was a collection of early reviews of the Origin of Species, along with David's essay introductions to the concepts at play in those reviews. That was 1973. The next year he had a little book published in the distinguished Prentice-Hall series, The Philosophy of Biology. These books established David as a leading philosopher of biology both in the U.S. and in the world. His magnum opus, Science as a Process, appeared in 1988 with Chicago. The book described the various methods and assumptions of systematists, especially focusing on the cladists and the pheneticists. What attracted attention, though, was David's effort to cast these scientific methods and theories into an evolutionary scheme in which ideas were the evolving entities. It was a concrete example of the possibilities of evolutionary epistemology. But many people picked up the book also for the tabloid delight it afforded, as David, with sober demeanor, described the machinations of the various members of the warring groups of systematists.

David was an extremely generous individual. Many a visiting scholar found a place to stay at David's flat on Wellington Ave. He harbored there for months at a time several post-docs, nurturing them, reading their essays, and helping them to get published, and to get positions. David put together quite a few small academic conferences and meetings during the 90s, making sure younger scholars and women participated. David had an eye for the intellectually stimulating spot: the outskirts of Paris, Barcelona, or Belagio. I suspect he had other criteria in mind as well.

David retired from Northwestern in the early 2000s. This gave him the time-and the inclination to compose a four-volume autobiography, which he self-published. My wife Barbara helped edit the volumes, mostly recommending that he really could not describe social gatherings in the intimate detail he had initially portrayed.

During the last ten years or so, my wife and I would go to the movies with David and dinner afterwards, about once a month during the academic year and about every two weeks in the summer. Barbara found it a challenge to pick the movies. Though David would go to any movie she selected, he would render a critical appraisal by slumping in his chair during the tedious parts of the flicks and by emitting loud, sonorous, sighs. He preferred action movies without too many artsy scenes. His taste in movies rather resembled those of Wittgenstein.

During the last three years of David's life, he suffered from several kinds of health problems, but did so with amazing equanimity. The loss of an eye did mean we really couldn't go to foreign films with subtitles; for David that was just as well. That and a heart attack precluded foreign travel. The last year of his life brought him to the hospital several times, with increasing frequency. On those occasions that appeared quite serious, Michael Ruse would fly up from Florida to be with David. Michael and David had formed a close bond over the years, with Michael inviting David to go on several trips to South America or Europe. Michael's robust style of philosophy found a complement in David's own uninflected views; so for the two volumes they edited in the philosophy of biology, few disagreements about meritorious philosophers arose.

David seemed not to fear death, of which he had seen so much. Rather, at the end he welcomed it. He did so without the consolations of religion, which he disdained. He met death with a Roman stoicism; and his friends recognized in that, not a gentle soul drifting off but a complex individual who knew joy and sorrow in unequal measures, a reflective individual sure of who he was. And he was a good man.

Christopher Horvath

David Hull's legacy includes outstanding achievements in at least three different but overlapping areas: his scholarship, his leadership and service to the professions of philosophy and biology, and his constant and courageous support and advocacy for his fellow gay and lesbian people. The organizers of this award ceremony invited me to speak about a particular aspect of David's service - his life-long commitment to the mentoring of gay and lesbian people and his support for the biological study of human nature, especially human sexuality.

I had the privilege of being David's post-doc in 1994-95. As was his usual practice with visiting colleagues, David invited me to live in the first-floor flat of his huge house on West Wellington Avenue at the southern end of what was at the time, Chicago's gay- ghetto. My first night in the house happened to fall on one of David's regular "Sunday Dinners". These dinners at David's house were casual mid-western style suppers; usually prepared by David himself. Though, sometimes David would allow the better cooks among his guests to prepare the meal. Paul Griffiths, for example, was allowed to cook. I was usually assigned to bring wine. There was always a mixture of scholars and students present at these dinners, as well as a collection of whatever friends might be staying at David's place on any given weekend. Dinner conversations ranged from the nature of species, to the history of Chicago's gay culture, to the latest gossip about somebody's embarrassing behavior at a recent conference.

That Sunday night, Michael Ruse was there - and the primary topic of conversation, as I remember it, was sex - an extremely frank discussion of gay sex if I remember correctly. Candid discussions about sex, politics, and the difficulties faced by gay and lesbian people were typical fair during these dinners as David was a very honest, open, upfront person. Visiting academics without much first hand exposure to the daily travails of Middle-American gay life often found themselves at supper with gay men some of whom had been rejected by their families at a very early age and never had the opportunity for higher education. These dinners were mostly about fun and friendship, but important working and mentoring relationships were formed and I think that eyes were often opened all around.

While I was David's post-doc I was on leave from my tenure track job at Illinois State University. I had been a member of that department for only a year and was taking a leave to complete the post-doc. As a young faculty member, I had not decided yet how "out" to be in my new job. I could tell that most of my department would be friendly and supportive, but I could also tell quite clearly that there were important people in other departments and in the administration that would not be supportive and probably even be outright hostile. I felt conflicted and more than a little frustrated. Should I keep my head down and the closet door fully closed until after I earned tenure or should I be honest and live my life in a way that put my commitment to myself and to my friends and family - my commitment to a full and happy life - on par with my professional life even if it put my professional success at risk?

David was very helpful, but not very sympathetic. David had led his life as an openly gay man since the 1960's and had been a fixture in Chicago's gay community since he started teaching at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee in the early 1970s. His open, honest, and unswerving commitment to the fair and equal treatment of gay and lesbian people was present from the vary beginning of his academic career - long before it was chic or politically correct, or in any way safe. He understood my dilemma, but he argued I had misconceived the problem. As far as David was concerned, the quality of my scholarship, teaching, and service were really all I had to worry about. If those things were strong enough, then I should be able to stand up to any hostile colleague or administrator. Being closeted - constantly expending time and energy monitoring myself, censoring my scholarly interests, depriving myself of healthy social interaction - was all too big a distraction from the primary task of getting my work done. His advice was to work hard, to make myself indispensible to my colleagues and my university and thus protect myself from the machinations of the few bigots with the power to make my life difficult.

That had been David's strategy and for him it had worked well. David was "out" as a graduate student at Indiana University during the 1960s. When the administration attempted to identify and expel a group of gay undergraduates, David refused to participate in the witch-hunt and put his own academic reputation on the line to defend his friends. David believed that people more concerned with the quality of his work than with the company he kept would defend him and that those looking to do harm to him and his fellow gay students didn't really have the courage for the fight. He was right.

In the 1970s while he was relatively secure as a tenured full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee a similar attempt to entrap and expel gay undergrads took place. David approached the administrator responsible and again put his own reputation on the line. He explained how bad it would look for the university, and for the personal ambitions of the Assistant Chancellor at the time, if he were to make the University's actions public. As had happened at Indiana, the administrator involved backed down and found a way to end the purge quietly. There are a number of stories like this and most of you who knew David know them. David was courageous, generous, and fair-minded. He was a star in the profession and that gave him considerable power. Many senior gay faculty members would have taken the opportunity to rest on their laurels. David used his status to help protect and mentor younger gay and lesbian faculty and students. He was willing to take risks others were usually unwilling to take - loudly and publically demanding that his profession treat all its members with respect and dignity.

David told me more than once that one of the accomplishments he was most proud of was using his time in office as President of the Philosophy of Science Association, and President of the Society for Systematic Zoology to convince these organizations not to meet in cities or states with laws that discriminated against gay and lesbian people. He was especially irate over some states' anti-sodomy laws. If straight members of the profession could attend professional meetings and socialize without the risk of discrimination, harassment and possible arrest, then it was the obligation of our professional organizations to see to it gay members had the same opportunity. When ISHPSSB itself was created, David and the other founding members established similar principles within our by-laws against meeting in states or countries that did not treat gay and lesbian members of the society equally. As I remember that first ISHPSSB meeting in Evanston, the most difficult part of achieving consensus on this issue among the founders of our society was explaining to some non-American colleagues just what anti-sodomy laws were. Evidently, there was doubt among some that any such laws could really exist in a civilized society. Once people were convinced that yes indeed there were places in America where the state sought to criminalize gay sex, our founders readily agreed to avoid such places.

David was not motivated by a political commitment to gay rights - David was about the least politically motivated and most politically cynical person I've ever met. He was motivated by a commitment to fairness and an unwavering loyalty to his friends and chosen family. He was committed to the view that as a senior member of our profession, he had an obligation to mentor and provide opportunities to younger members.

David's approach to service and to life in general was guided by a classic Midwestern American attitude: If something needed to be done, you just did it. If a paper needed to be written you just sat down and wrote it. If a bully needed standing up to, you just stood up to him. If people you loved were dying of AIDS related illnesses and needed taking care of, you took care them. The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s began by taking the life of David's long time partner Dick Wellman. Before the decade was out David had learned more about HIV medicine than many of the doctors treating his friends. David helped guide many of those friends through the maze of the Chicago health care system set up to care for people with AIDS and then nursed several of these men through the final days of their lives. By the time I met David in 1994, the epidemic had slowed, but by then, David had lost almost all of his Chicago family. Fortunately for many of us, he was well on the way to creating a new one.

While David's own scholarly agenda was full with his own projects and questions, he saw the value in careful philosophical and biological study of human sexuality and he strongly encouraged me (and others) to pursue my interest in this area. He was not an advocate of contemporary Queer Studies or of Social Constructivist accounts of human nature in general. David's approach to both his life and his scholarship were very practical and very frank. He did not have much patience for obfuscation or for overly complex theoretical constructs.

At the same time David never bought into the current theoretical model of gay men as biologically or psychologically "feminine". The view that gay men have "female-typical" brains has become the received view among many psychologists and behavioral biologists. David rejected this view because it seemed to conceive of homosexual men as inherently "defective" heterosexual men. Because of the long history of culturally based prejudice against homosexuals, David was deeply skeptical of any theory of human sexuality that was built upon the "heterosexual as normal - homosexual as abnormal" dichotomy.

I think the clearest articulation of David's own view on the nature of homosexuality and of what he thought an adequate explanation for homosexuality might look like can be found in his 1985 Presidential Address to the PSA. In it, he argues that any adequate account of human nature must treat the human species as polytypic. Instead of treating Homo sapiens as having a single unifying "nature" and explaining deviation from that nature as abnormality or defect, an adequate account of human nature must be built from the view that variation is the norm among humans. Instead of treating heterosexuality as the "wild-type" and homosexuality as the developmental defect in need of an explanation, David envisioned a biological explanation for human sexuality that began with the recognition that variation in patterns of sexual arousal among human beings is the norm.

Allow me to conclude my remarks by quoting from the last paragraph of David's 1995 Presidential Address. I think these sentences best sum up David's view about the biology of homosexuality and about the fair treatment of gay and lesbian people:

Estimates of the percentage of human beings who engage in sexual activity and pair bond exclusively or primarily with members of their own sex vary from five to ten percent. These percentages may vary from society to society and from time to time. I do not see that it matters. All the ingenuity which has been exercised trying to show that all human beings are essentially the same might be better used trying to explain why we must all be essentially the same in order to have such things as human rights. Why cannot people who are essentially different nevertheless have the same rights? Until this question is answered, I remain suspicious of continued claims about the existence and importance of human nature.

Treasurer's Report

Lisa Gannett

The Society is in healthy financial shape. Financial statements for 2009 (year-end balance $82,447.52) and 2010 (year-end balance $90,773.16) can be found at http://www.ishpssb.org/operations/treasurer.html. Of special note, proceeds from the Brisbane 2009 meeting were $18,050.82: thanks go to the local organization headed by Paul Griffiths and program co-chairs Manfred Laubichler and Marsha Richmond. $29,203.60 from travel fund donations, general funds, and a National Science Foundation grant were spent on supporting graduate student travel to the Brisbane meeting. Because of historically low interest rates, PayPal fees for handling transactions (memberships, journal subscriptions) have far outstripped dividends since 2009, but there is no need yet to raise membership fees in compensation. The Society's members need to be congratulated for their generosity: record donations were received during 2010 and the first six months of 2011-not just for the Hull Prize but student travel as well.

Report of the Travel Support Committee 2009-11