On Tue, 2 Sep 2008 18:57:21 -0400, Wirt Atmar <atmar@AICS-
RESEARCH.COM> wrote:

>Brice writes:
>
>> Fred was an Atheist who had an epiphany.  He came to reverse his opinion
>> on that based upon scientific evidence.  He later exposed some 'holes' in
>> evolutionary theory, one of which was sometimes called the 'two mountains'
>> hypothesis, or theory, or proposal.  I do not have the reference here so I 
>> cannot go into detail.  As well read as Wirt might be, I cannot help but 
>> wonder if he has ready anything by Hoyle, except maybe how to play
>> card games.
>
>Asking as to whether I would hire Fred Hoyle, he wouldn't be on my short 
list, 
>not because he wasn't intelligent, but because he strenuously worked 
towards 
>the answer that he wanted, selectively culling that evidence that fit his 
>predispositions and ignoring the rest. In that manner, he exhibited all of the 
>worst sins of the creationists, and that's no way to do science.
>
>As to his "two mountains" hypothesis, I had never heard of it before. Nor 
have 
>apparently many others. In the several billion webpages on the internet, this 
is 
>only page that I could find that referenced any similar comment, and it's not 
>really clear that the comment is even associated with Hoyle:
>
>   http://iidb.infidels.org/vbb/archive/index.php/t-148104.html
>

It is clear to me it is associtated with Hoyle.

>However, the correspondent in that discussion gets the answer wrong to the 
>question posed. The question is: how does an evolving population pass from 
>one peak of optimization to another without first going through a valley of 
>lower quality.
>
>This is a question that occurs in the first week of every class on evolutionary 
>optimization and I've written about it often. Here's one of my papers from 14 
>years ago, written in an IEEE journal to an engineering audience, where I 
>answer the question. It at least has the benefit of being brief and to the 
point:
>
>   http://aics-research.com/research/notes.html#IID
>

This is simple too rife with academic language meaningful only to people with
degrees in the subject.  

>But its second benefit is that it's easy to demonstrate that it's not a problem 
>and is easily surmounted when code and behavior are separated. Selection 
>operates against the behaviors it sees in the context of its current 
>environment; mutation operates on the inherited code without regard to 
>selection or the environment in which it will be expressed
>
>Wirt Atmar
>
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