Abstract

I must have met Jim Griesemer in the late 1980s, at an early meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB, ISH for short). I have seen him at ISH almost every other summer since then, as we historians, philosophers, STSers, and biologists gather to share with each other our perspectives and learn about the tools we bring to bear on the study of biology. Unlike many of the other introducers in this volume, I have not worked closely with Jim. What pulled me into his orbit was our shared commitment to what I have called an “amphibious” approach to analyzing the life sciences, one that, as Jim has put it, requires “lowering the guardrails” of the disciplines we inhabit to learn from each other and to gain greater understanding of how biology is done. What has kept me reading his work are our common interests in the histories of knowledge-making in embryology, evolution, and ecology, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; philosophical questions about part–whole relations, representation, and models; and sociological queries into the roles of institutional and social structures in shaping biological knowledge, including relations between amateur and professional naturalists. Over the past thirty-odd years, these common interests have made me return time and again to his writings, with much profit.