Darwin and his successors have railed against the fallacy of confusing the current utility of a trait with the reason the trait evolved. For example, Darwin argued that skull sutures in mammals did not evolve because they facilitate live birth; the sutures were in place well before live birth evolved. Checking the chronological order in which different traits evolved in a lineage is one way to test an adaptive hypothesis; the fact of common ancestry is what makes that checking possible.

This is not to deny that there are versions of theism that do conflict with evolutionary biology. Young Earth Creationism is an example; it claims that God created life on earth within the past 10,000 to 50,000 years. But other types of theism are different.

Just as thought experiments can't show that vitalism is true (or that it is false), they also can't show that dualism is true (or that it is false).

The rabid opposition to group selection has now considerably subsided. In the process, the conceptual structure of evolutionary theory has become clearer, as have the relationships that connect different theoretical approaches.

Scientists often seek predictively accurate models, rather than models that are true.

Biologists now pretty universally regard vitalism as a vestige of a bygone age.

Evolutionary game theory was originally developed as an alternative to the hypothesis of group selection; now it is clear that game theory models postulate group selection, even if they do not use the g-word.