   Why should biologists and philosophers care about the debate over adaptationism? This debate has been and will continue to be important to biologists because it helps clarify how to do better evolutionary biology. Despite this, a minority of currently-active biologists contribute to the debate about adaptationism, and many ignore it or disparage it. For a variety of reasons, many of the important points that have arisen from the debate, such as how to structure empirical tests of adaptive hypotheses and optimality models, go unheeded. For example, claims for local optimality continue to appear that lack a specification of even a single alternative hypothesis to the adaptive hypothesis. This lack inevitably leaves ambiguous the status of the adaptive hypothesis. In addition, standards for rejection of the (only) adaptive hypothesis continue to be rarely delineated if at all.