James R. Griesemer is an internationally renowned philosopher and historian of science whose contributions span the philosophy, history, and social studies of genetics, ecology, morphology, taxonomy, biodiversity studies, and developmental and evolutionary biology. His writings are cited and admired by scholars in all of these fields because of Griesemer’s fundamental contributions to understanding reproduction, cultural evolution, model systems, the role of theories, abstraction, visualizations and diagrams, data practices, origins of life, epigenetics, and many other topics (Fig. 1.1).