Galaxy formation is an intriguing but difficult subject. Substantial progress has been made over the last few years, culminating in a rough consensus on a ``standard'' picture of galaxy formation (e.g., Mo et al. 1998). In spite of my own modest contributions to this (e.g., Mo et al. 1994), it is my contention that this picture is wrong.
Empirically, there are a number of striking regularities in the dynamical data for disk galaxies. These enable us to describe the effective force law. It is remarkably uniform, and depends only on the luminous mass.