Fitness landscapes do not reflect a tangible entity, but they are a conceptual tool (such as psychometric g). I do not find it palatable to think that the desired place in a fitness landscape is a local max, but rather a local minimum as I prefer to imagine a ball rolling down to a valley.

"Michael Behe's newest piece of work"? You meant to say "excrement" or "bunkum". Intelligent design, creationism, or whatever manifestation that this pseudoscience takes is absolutely risible. The advocates of such vacuous nonsense has merited my emnity and disdain for their eructations as they seek to stymie the erudition of our children.

Fitness landscapes do not reflect a tangible entity, but they are a conceptual tool (such as psychometric g). I do not find it palatable to think that the desired place in a fitness landscape is a local max, but rather a local minimum as I prefer to imagine a ball rolling down to a valley.

well, i think the lower-dimensional models are instructive heuristics, but reality is multi-dimensional. i don't think the analogy to g does justice to g, fitness landscapes as anything more than illustrative visuals is something that is relatively recent.

My comment got out of hand and turned into a blog post of its own.

Not only are fitness landscapes conceptual frameworks that should not be used to disprove evolution (E.G. jumps from peak to another), but we should remember that the landscape is CONSTANTLY changing. So when we look back at evolution, two mountains which may seem permanently disconnected from our perspective may have had a ridge or even been valleys historically. While this does not explain certain evolutionary contradictions, it may explain some.