David Lee Hull (June 15, 1935 – August 11, 2010)^[1] was an American philosopher who was most notable for founding the field philosophy of biology.^[2] Hull is recognized within evolutionary culture studies as contributing heavily in early discussions of the conceptualization of memetics.^[3][4] In addition to his academic prominence, he was well known as a gay man who fought for the rights of other gay and lesbian philosophers.^[5] Hull was partnered with Richard "Dick" Wellman, a Chicago school teacher, until Wellman's passing during the drafting of Science as Process.^[6]

Education and career

Hull initially got a bachelor's degree in Biology at Illinois Wesleyan University.^[6] He then became one of the first graduates of the History and Philosophy of Science department at Indiana University (IU). After earning his PhD from IU, he taught at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee for 20 years before moving to Northwestern, where he taught for another 20 years. Hull was a former president of the Philosophy of Science Association, the ISHPSSB, and the Society for Systematic Biology. He was particularly well known for his argument that species are not sets or collections but rather spatially and temporally extended individuals (also called the individuality thesis or "species-as-individuals" thesis).

He is considered to have founded and systematically developed the area of philosophy of biology as it is understood in contemporary philosophy. Hull proposed an elaborate discussion of science as an evolutionary process in his 1988 book, which also offered a historical account of the "taxonomy wars" of the 1960s and 1970s between three competing schools of taxonomy: phenetics, evolutionary systematics, and cladistics. In Hull's view, science evolves like organisms and populations do, with a demic population structure, subject to selection for ideas based on "conceptual inclusive credit." Either novelty or citation of work gives credit, and the professional careers of scientists share in credit by using successful research. This is a "hidden hand" account of scientific progress.

Additionally, Hull regularly contributed to a variety of studies of evolutionary culture. He contributed to philosophical and empirical accounts of the evolution of science and evolutionary epistemology. While most of his work is in metaphysics and epistemology of evolution and biology, some of his work is closely related to what has since been called Bibliometrics, Scientometrics, or Science of Science. He forwarded citation analysis to develop an account of the evolutionary survival of scientific ideas^[7] which has a direct relationship to what has been called Knowledge Memes or Science Memes.^[8]

He also contributed to evolutionary culture theory more broadly by contributing to initial discussions surrounding the generalization of Richard Dawkins' evolutionary vehicles in memetics research. In relation to Richard Dawkins' theory of replicators, Hull introduced the notion of interactors.^[9][10]

He was Dressler Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at Northwestern University.^[11]