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.
The winners of the Grene prize 2023 are Adrian Stencel, Javier Suarez, and Sophie Veigl for their paper: “Rethinking Hereditary Relations: The Reconstitutor as the Evolutionary Unit of Heredity.” The paper was presented during the Oslo meeting in 2019 and published in Synthese in 2022. In this paper, the authors propose to replace the notions of “replicator,” “reproducer,” and “Darwinian individual” by the notion of a “reconstitutor” as the unit of heredity. A reconstitutor is “the structure resulting from a set of relationships between different elements or processes that are actively involved in the recreation of a specific phenotypic variant in each generation regardless of the biomolecular basis of the elements or whether they stand in a continuous line of ancestry.” In contrast, they argue, replicator, reproducer and Darwinian individuals all rely on the condition of lineage formation. The paper goes through thorough examination of philosophical and biological literature and proposes a strong, ambitious and original alternative model of heredity.
Jim Griesemer
Co-chair of the Marjorie Grene and Werner Callebaut Prizes Committee