Dick Lewontin's Triple Helix updates a conceptual framework that has been evolving since at least the 1950s for seeing biology as the joint action of the genetic system, the organism in its development and physiology, and the organism in its environment. But this program for an integrated population biology remains an aspiration that has not been carried out in practice. Instead, we see a gross imbalance among these components and a continued separation of the disciplines. There has always been a much finer sophistication of our understanding of genetic variation than of the environment. Some of the reasons for this have been discussed in previous volumes of this series: the gene-centered reductionist view of evolution located all the richness of evolution in the genes, so that the nuances of genetic structure had priority. The mechanisms of Mendelian genetics allowed for the formulation of precise dynamic models, while statistical theory encouraged attempts to measure the relevant parameters even when unrealistic assumptions were needed. This has led to highly simplified and casual assumptions about environments being reflected in the “just so” stories of sociobiology, where it was enough to declare something to be a trait that it would be advantageous to consider as genetically determined and whose evolution had been explained.