In Thurber's fairy tale Many Moons, the king summons his advisors to fetch the moon for the princess. To the king's dismay, each advisor claims that the moon is made of a different substance and thinks it to be a different distance away. The court jester finds the solution. Obviously, each advisor sees the moon differently. Just ask the princess what she thinks. Only then will the king know what to do. As it turns out, she thinks the moon is smaller than her fingernail and is made of gold.

Evolutionary biology suffers from much the same diversity of viewpoints and expectations. We tend to forget the importance of other perspectives and areas of study. Schindewolf saw evolutionary change through the perspective of the fossil record. Just like the princess looking at the moon alongside her fingernail, one is likely to draw incorrect conclusions. In more recent years, paleontological studies have injected a number of exciting and substantive ideas into evolutionary theory, even if the fingernail perspective is sometimes apparent. By ignoring the dimension of geological time, population biologists heretofore have largely ignored the colossal biotic changes that have swept the planet. Molecular evolutionists and students of molecular adaptation have ascended to prominence, and sometimes it seems as if they feel that a complete catalogue of genes and nucleotide sequences will solve the deep problems of evolutionary biology. But to dismiss the new knowledge of the genome as mindless reductionism is to miss the most important window we have on organismal organization. It's just that the window is still very dirty.