 During the paleobiological revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, a number of paleontologists sought to establish paleontology’s status as an evolutionary discipline, with something to say about evolutionary theory. This shift was reflected in the decision to use the term ‘paleobiology’ (Sepkoski &amp; Ruse 2009). For some of these scientists of the 1970s and 1980s, the disciplinary autonomy of paleobiology was closely linked to ideas about macroevolution. As Steven Stanley (1975) put it, their thought was that macroevolution is “uncoupled” from microevolution, and that macroevolutionary patterns sometimes require explanation in terms of macro-level processes. One early move in this direction was the construction of the MBL model (Gould, Raup, Sepkoski, Schopf, and Simberloff 1977), a computer simulation of macroevolutionary processes that explicitly ignored microevolutionary factors such as natural selection (Sepkoski 2012). Today, this approach is sometimes known as the “hierarchical expansion” of evolutionary theory, and it remains the focus of quite a bit of theoretical work (see, e.g., Eldredge, Pievani, Serrelli, &amp; Temkin 2016).