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Two giants of evolutionary theory, Sewall Wright and R. A. Fisher, foughtbitterly for over thirty years. The Wright-Fisher controversy forms acornerstone of the history and philosophy of biology. I argue that the standardinterpretations of the Wright-Fisher controversy do not accurately representthe ideas and arguments of these two key historical figures. The usual accountcontrasts the major slogans attached to each name: Wright's adaptive landscapeand shifting balance theory of evolution versus Fisher's fundamental theorem ofnatural selection. These alternative theories are in fact incommensurable.Wright's theory is a detailed dynamical model of evolutionary change in actualpopulations. Fisher's theory is an abstract invariance and conservation lawthat, like all physical laws, captures essential features of a system but doesnot account for all aspects of dynamics in real examples. This key contrastbetween embodied theories of real cases and abstract laws is missing from prioranalyses of Wright versus Fisher. They never argued about this contrast.Instead, the issue at stake in their arguments concerned the actual dynamics ofreal populations. Both agreed that fluctuations of nonadditive (epistatic) genecombinations play a central role in evolution. Wright emphasized stochasticfluctuations of gene combinations in small, isolated populations. By contrast,Fisher believed that fluctuating selection in large populations was the maincause of fluctuation in nonadditive gene combinations. Close reading shows thatwidely cited views attributed to Fisher mostly come from what Wright said aboutFisher, whereas Fisher's own writings clearly do not support such views.

Wright's adaptive landscape versus Fisher's fundamental theorem