A few years after Baker's seminal paper (1955), Carlquist (1966) stated that if dioecious stocks immigrated to the [Hawaiian] islands, Baker's law must be in part abandoned. One year later, this led Baker to clarify his view in a famous paper published in the pages of Evolution (Baker 1967). More than 50 years after Baker's seminal paper, the commentary by Jeremiah Busch (2011) demonstrates that Baker's ideas are still debated in the field of plant mating systems. In this article, Busch discusses the discrepancies that arise between Baker's verbal predictions (Baker 1955, 1967) and our model predictions (Cheptou and Massol 2009; Massol and Cheptou 2011), even though pollination heterogeneity is at the heart of both theories. Our theoretical models (Cheptou and Massol 2009; Massol and Cheptou 2011) did not aim at formalizing Baker's law per se. Because the literature dealing with dispersal/mating system trait association is replete with references to Baker's arguments, we are aware that our predictions will naturally be judged with regard to Baker's law, but we think it is important to clarify that we analysed the evolutionary consequence of spatio-temporal variation in populations of a simple metapopulation, rather than Baker's law. Busch (2011) does not present an opposition to our metapopulation arguments and we think that the two points of view do not conflict. In the light of Busch's commentary, we endeavour to clarify some issues associated with Baker's ideas, especially focusing on the rationale behind Baker's arguments and its derivatives. We have identified three points that may help to clarify the debate surrounding the veracity of Baker's law and the association of outcrossing traits and dispersal traits in organisms. Because empirical data on selfing and dispersal have been discussed elsewhere (e.g., Price and Jain 1981; Barrett 1996; Van Kleunen et al. 2008), we will not review them here, focusing instead on logical arguments.