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

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

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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