James Griesemer

James Griesemer is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis, where he has been on the faculty since 1983. He earned an A.B. in Genetics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1977, an M.S. in Biology from the University of Chicago in 1981, and a Ph.D. in Conceptual Foundations of Science from the University of Chicago in 1983. His career includes serving as Director of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science from 1990 to 1996, Chair of the Department of Philosophy from 2005 to 2010 and 2015 to 2020, and affiliations with the Science and Technology Studies Program, Center for Science and Innovation Studies, Population Biology Graduate Group, Cultural Studies Graduate Group, and Center for Population Biology. Griesemer was President of the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology from 2007 to 2009, Past President from 2009 to 2011, and has held fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1992-1993), Collegium Budapest (1994-1995), Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (1998), and the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (2005-present). He received the UC Davis Graduate Program Advising and Mentoring Award in 2022 and was honored with a special conference session at the 2023 ISHPSSB meeting for his contributions to topics including reproduction, cultural evolution, model systems, and data practices.

Griesemer's research specializes in the philosophy of biology, encompassing philosophical, historical, and social studies of evolutionary biology, genetics, developmental biology, ecology, and systematics. His work addresses models in museum-based natural history and laboratory ecology, units and levels of inheritance and selection, visual representations in embryology and genetics, reproduction, scaffolding in evolution, culture, and cognition, and the re-situation of scientific knowledge in population genomics. Notable publications include the highly cited 'Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39' (1989, over 17,000 citations), 'The Units of Evolutionary Transition' (2001), 'Development, Culture, and the Units of Inheritance' (2000), and 'Reproducing Entrenchments to Scaffold Culture: The Central Role of Development in Cultural Evolution' (2007). He is principal investigator on an NSF-funded project on re-situating scientific knowledge and a John Templeton Foundation-funded study of interdisciplinarity. Griesemer serves on editorial boards for Biology and Philosophy, Biological Theory, and others, and is writing a book, Reproduction in the Evolutionary Process.

Professional Email: jrgriesemer@ucdavis.edu