 The status of population genetics in contemporary biology is an interesting issue. Despite its centrality to evolutionary theory, and its historical importance, population genetics is not without its critics. Some argue that population geneticists have devoted too much energy to developing theoretical models, often with great mathematical ingenuity, and too little to actually testing the models against empirical data (Wade 2005). This was probably a fair criticism at one time, however the recent flourishing of molecular population genetics has changed the situation, allowing much greater contact between theory and data (Hahn 2018). Others argue that population-genetic models are usually too idealized to shed any real light on the evolutionary process, and are limited in what they can teach us about phenotypic evolution (Pigliucci 2008). Still others have argued that, historically, population genetics has had a relatively minor impact on the actual practice of most evolutionary biologists, despite the lip-service often paid to it (Lewontin 1980). However, not all biologists accept these criticisms. Thus the geneticist Michael Lynch (2007), for example, has written that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of population genetics”, in a twist on Dobzhansky’s famous dictum; see Bromham (2009) and Pigliucci (2008) for discussion of Lynch’s arguments. And in a recent survey of 50 years of population genetics, Charlesworth and Charlesworth (2017) argue that population-genetic analysis has not only enabled us to understand the nature and causes of molecular genetic variation, but has also provided deep insights into a variety of topics in evolutionary biology.