   The debate over adaptationism will continue to be important to philosophers of biology because much will be gained by a more informed understanding of the use of hypotheses about natural selection by biologists. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a general tendency to misunderstand the conceptual commitments of users of optimality models. More recently, there has been a growing understanding of the variety of conceptual commitments held by users of such models, especially that the use and development of an optimality model need not bind the user to a blind acceptance of the claim that natural selection is all powerful.