   It is this combination of social, institutional, and scientific developments that formed the background to Gould and Lewontin's 1979 paper, which can be best understood as an important but not singular event in a long-standing debate in evolutionary biology. It is neither the beginning of the debate over adaptationism nor something much narrower, e.g., little more than “the attempted intellectual lynching” of sociobiology, cf., Queller (1995); see also Pigliucci and Kaplan (2000). Such claims are at best historically incorrect.