Having been asked to summarize and comment on the conference "Reflections on Ecology and Evolutionary Biology," I have found myself, like many biologists, in the position of knowing far less of the history of my field than I should, and of perceiving such history as I "know" through the filter of my own training and experience. Especially in actively developing fields of science, the practitioner is likely to focus on current events so exclusively as to be unaware of their historical origins; we pay homage in the opening paragraphs of our papers to the towering figures, while being only vaguely aware of the actual history by which we have come to ask the questions we pose and hold the theories we espouse. As a practitioner of what has come to be called "evolutionary ecology," I have found myself illuminated by this symposium: evolutionary ecology, although it has borne that name for little more than twenty years, has a long, complex history. What is the subject matter of evolutionary ecology? If we look to recent textbooks in whose titles the term figures (for instance, those by Eric Pianka and Jonathan Roughgarden), we will find some "pure" ecology and some "pure" population genetics, presented both on their own merits and as a foundation for developing the subject matter of evolutionary ecology proper.' Under that head we will find subjects such as the evolution of life histories, of mating systems, of sex; the adaptive basis of territoriality, foraging behavior, social behavior; the theory of coevolution and its application to adaptive radiation and the species diversity of communities; a greater or lesser coverage of topics like adaptation to physically stressful environments or the role of environmental heterogeneity in maintaining genetic variation. A student could