Evelyn Fox Keller

Evelyn Fox Keller (March 20, 1936 – September 22, 2023) was an American physicist, author, Keller's early work concentrated at the intersection of physics and biology. Her subsequent research focused on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science.

Biography Born in Jackson Heights, Queens to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Keller grew up in Woodside, Queens. She received her B.A. in physics from Brandeis University in 1957 and continued her studies in theoretical physics at Harvard University graduating with a Ph.D. in 1963. She became interested in molecular biology during a visit to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory while completing her Ph.D. dissertation. Keller has also taught at Northeastern University, Cornell University, University of Maryland, Northwestern University, Princeton University, State University of New York at Purchase, New York University and in the department of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 2007 Keller sat on the USA advisory board of FFIPP (Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace-USA), a network of Palestinian, Israeli, and International faculty, and students, working for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and just peace. When she won the Israeli Dan David Prize in 2018, she publicly donated the award to human rights organizations.

Evelyn Fox Keller died on September 22, 2023, in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the age of 87.

Discussion of work Keller first encountered feminism as a discipline while attending a conference entitled "Women and the Scientific Profession." At this conference, Erik Erikson and Bruno Bettelheim argued for more women in science based on the invaluable contributions a "specifically female genius" could make to science. Four years later, in 1969, she compiled an array of data on the experiences of women scientists and put together an argument about women in (or out of) science, based on "women's nature." She had been feeling disenchantment from her colleague publishing her team's work and she had not realized the reason behind it until she did her research.

In 1974 Keller taught her first women's studies course. Shortly after, she was invited to give a series of lectures on her work. She had never shared what it was like for her as a woman becoming a scientist and this lecture marked the beginning of her work as a feminist critic of science. It raised three central questions that marked her research and writing over the next decade.

According to Yale sociologist Rene Almeling, Keller "is part of a generation of scholars who so thoroughly established 'gender and science' as a legitimate subject of inquiry that it made possible decades and decades of subsequent research among historians, philosophers, and social scientists." According to The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Philosophers in America, her later work addressed the role of language in mediating relations between science and society more generally, including "an unusually scientifically acute and philosophically sophisticated set of case studies in the history of science, particularly of biological sciences in the twentieth century.

In her work entitled Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines Keller discusses the relation between "understanding", "computability" and "predictability", reflecting on the role of mathematical and computational models. that describe models as mediators between theory and practice, Keller notes that in mathematical biology models can be simultaneously "guides for doing as much as for thinking." and Nancy Cartwright.

Keller's studies of the interplay between scientific theory, on the one hand, and the linguistic, technological, psychological, political, and other "external" factors that play a role in shaping it, are among the subtlest and most insightful in the literature. She usually conducts these inquiries through discussion of particular episodes or trajectories in the history of science. History thus becomes her philosophical laboratory."

Criticism Some scholars who study women in science have criticized the version of gender and science theory that was pioneered by Keller. Ann Hibner Koblitz has argued that Keller's theory fails to account for the great variation among different cultures and time periods. For example, the first generation of women to receive advanced university degrees in Europe were almost entirely in the natural sciences and medicine—in part because those fields at the time were much more welcoming of women than were the humanities. Koblitz and others who are interested in increasing the number of women in science have expressed concern that some of Keller's statements could undermine those efforts, notably the following:

Among the critics of Keller's gender and science theory are the mathematical physicist Mary Beth Ruskai, the former presidents of the Association for Women in Mathematics Lenore Blum and Mary Gray, and gender researchers Pnina Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram.

These debates raise the broader question of the distinction between the analysis of women in science as a profession vs. gender and scientific theory.

Published works

1983 A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. Freeman 1985 Reflections on Gender and Science. Yale University Press 1989 Three Cultures: Fifteen Lectures on the Confrontation of Academic Cultures. The Hague : Univ. Pers Rotterdam 1990 Conflicts in Feminism. (co-edited with Marianne Hirsch) Routledge 1990 Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science. (co-edited with Mary Jacobus and Sally Shuttleworth) Routledge (reprinted 2013 ) 1992 Secrets of Life/Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science. Routledge 1995 Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-century Biology. The Wellek Library Lecture Series at the University of California, Irvine. Columbia University Press 1996 Feminism and Science. (co-edited with Helen Longine) Oxford Readings in Feminism 1998 Keywords in Evolutionary Biology (co-edited with Elisabeth Lloyd). Harvard University Press (reprinted 1998 ). 2000 The Century of the Gene. Harvard University Press 2002 Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines. Harvard University Press 2010 The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture. Duke University Press 2017 Cultures without Culturalism: The Making of Scientific Knowledge (co-edited with Karine Chemla) Duke University Press 2017 The Seasons Alter: How to Save Our Planet in Six Acts. (co-authored with Philip Kitcher). Norton. 2023 Making Sense of My Life in Science: A Memoir. Modern Memoirs, Inc.

Awards and honors 1986 Distinguished Publication Award, from the Association for Women in Psychology 1987-1988 Member, Institute for Advanced Study 1991 Mount Holyoke College, Commencement Speaker and Honorary Degree Recipient (Doctor of Humane Letters)

1992 MacArthur Fellowship – also called the Genius Grant 1993 University of Amsterdam, Honorary Doctorate Recipient 1996 Luleå University of Technology, Honorary Degree Recipient (Doctor of Technology) 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship 2001 Wesleyan University, Commencement Speaker and Honorary Doctorate Recipient 2004–2005 Radcliffe Institute Fellow 2005 Appointed to the Blaise Pascal Research Chair by the Préfecture de la Région D'Ile-de-France 2006 Elected Member of the American Philosophical Society 2007 Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2008 Dartmouth 2008 Honorary Degree Recipient (Doctor of Science) 2011 Science Hall of Fame 2011 John Desmond Bernal Prize from the Society for Social Study of Science 2018 Dan David Prize