The Callebaut Prize was established in 2015, and is awarded every two years. It is intended to advance the careers of recent graduates working at the intersection of the fields represented by ISHPSSB by recognizing the best manuscript utilizing an interdisciplinary approach based on a presentation at one of the two previous ISH meetings by someone who was, at the time of presentation, a graduate student. The prize is named in honor of Werner Callebaut, whose untimely death in 2014 was mourned by the philosophy of biology community worldwide and particularly ISH members, and who made considerable contributions to the promotion of constructive dialogue and reciprocal respect in philosophical and scientific work, hence making a prize focused on interdisciplinarity most appropriate.
We are grateful to individual donors who have supported this prize, as well as to the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) for support for the first three prizes.
The winner of the Callebaut prize 2023 is Devin Gouvêa for her paper: “Historicizing the homology problem.” The paper was presented during the Oslo meeting in 2019 and published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science in 2023. In this paper, the author questions the historical relevance of a strong contrast between the historical and the mechanical views of homological sameness, as rooted respectively in common ancestry and shared developmental resources. In particular, she revisits the interpretation that Otto Haas and George Gaylord Simpson gave of Edwin Ray Lankester as representative of the historical view, and the discussion that Simpson had with Boyden on the same question. This well-informed and solid historical analysis uses archives and correspondence, and shows awareness of relevant issues in systematics and other adjacent fields. It is completed with a discussion of contemporary philosophical contributions on homology, specifically, with Brigandt's notion of an epistemic goal. The committee was impressed by the mastery of these domains and the clever articulation of arguments relevant to all of them.
Jim Griesemer
Co-chair of the Marjorie Grene and Werner Callebaut Prizes Committee