As of July 1, 2020 I am former department Chair again and looking forward to starting sabbatical. I will be working to complete my long-in-the-making book on reproduction in the evolutionary process and also working on my NSF-funded project on the resituation of scientific knowledge with Carlos Andrés Barragán. We are studying how objects of knowledge travel with a case study of human population genomics.

How

I checked Google Scholar today, (August 20, 2019) and it reports that Star and Griesemer (1989) — the boundary objects paper — has 10,077 citations! Crossref counts 3,742 and Web of Science counts 3,562 (according to the Sage Journals web page on our article). Sage reports 4,277 downloads since December 2016.

I’m pleased to report that I became a Distinguished Professor at UC Davis on July 1, 2019! I won’t be resting on laurels, though, since I don’t have any laurels, though I do think I have some bay leaf in a jar on the kitchen counter somewhere …

I thank the community for supporting my promotion and hope to get some work done as a Distinguished Professor before I become an Extinguished Professor.

When I became department Chair for the second time around, I thought it would be easy — well, easier anyway — but I was wrong. I felt a bit like Rip Van Winkle having woken up to a completely different administrative world in 2015 than the one I “left” in 2010. It’s proven difficult to pay much attention to my career as a scholar while Chairing a department. Hopefully after June 2020 when I’m done Chairing, I can return to exploring a more active online presence. Although I feel pretty sure that while I’ve been Chairing, the online world has changed to the point that “blogging” is sooo 2005 and I’ll need to catch up to whatever the latest thing is in 2020. I doubt, for example, that it will be Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, though you won’t find me in any of those places even if they are “current” by the time I’m resurfacing.

I talked about “hacking” academic performance metrics at the “Gaming Metrics” workshop on “Innovation & Surveillance in Academic Misconduct” workshop on February 4, 2016 at UC Davis, organized by the “Innovating Communication in Scholarship Project” and supported by the Center for Science and Innovation Studies. It was a blast. I talked about Goodhart’s Law and was making the case that metrics used to set performance standards are doomed to fail because, as Goodhart argued, people change their behavior when metrics are used as public standards. As Lucas argued, contra macro-econometric models serving as policy guides, this means that the underlying causal structure changes because of this kind of use of metrics. My talk was about taking Goodhart’s Law “meta” — to argue that we should explicitly and transparently try to hack metrics in order to learn about social dynamics in the age of digital measurement and have some fun doing it.

One of the terrific things that happened during another conference on a related topic is that while sitting next to Jonathan Eisen, I pitched the idea, which he loved, and he bought  the domain: viXraoib (the inverse of bioarXiv) so we can use it to set up a journal to hack metrics and write about it. So, it’s put up or shut up time.

Sabina Leonelli interviewed me along with Rachel Ankeny and John Dupré about philosophy of biology for The Reasoner for Volume 9, Number 3 March 2015.

My paper on David Wake’s contribution to evo-devo is the featured publication in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology Newsletter for February 2015.

http://mvz.berkeley.edu/Newsletter/?n=201502

You can find the paper, number 57, at my Box.com publications page. See also paper number 54 for more on David Wake.

Griesemer, J., 2015. “What Salamander Biologists Have Taught Us About Evo-Devo,” in Alan C. Love (ed), Conceptual Change in Biology: Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives on Evolution and Development (Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 307). Springer Verlag, Dordrecht, pp 271-301.

I was recently interviewed for an article, Is DNA the Language of the Book of Life? by Regan Penaluna, on information in biology that just appeared in Nautilus (nautil.us). If you haven’t checked out the magazine, it’s definitely worth a look.

http://nautil.us/blog/is-dna-the-language-of-the-book-of-life

Anole Annals is “Your source for the latest on Anolis lizards.” Jonathan Losos, Professor and Curator of Herpetology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, published a very kind blog entry on December 1, 2014, about two recent papers of mine. Jonathan’s post is: “David Wake, Organism-Based Research, and the Rise of Evo-Devo.”

The papers of mine Jonathan discusses are papers # 54 and #57 on my publications page at Box.com

Griesemer, J. 2013. “Integration of Approaches in David Wake’s Model-Taxon Research Platform for Evolutionary Morphology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44: 525–536.

Griesemer, J., 2015. “What Salamander Biologists Have Taught Us About Evo-Devo,” in Alan C. Love (ed), Conceptual Change in Biology: Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives on Evolution and Development (Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 307). Springer Verlag, Dordrecht, pp 271-301.