  Skepticism of the building block hypothesis (BBH) has previously been
expressed on account of the weak theoretical foundations of this hypothesis and
the anomalies in the empirical record of the simple genetic algorithm. In this
paper we hone in on a more fundamental cause for skepticism--the extraordinary
strength of some of the assumptions that undergird the BBH. Specifically, we
focus on assumptions made about the distribution of fitness over the genome
set, and argue that these assumptions are unacceptably strong. As most of these
assumptions have been embraced by the designers of so-called "competent"
genetic algorithms, our critique is relevant to an appraisal of such algorithms
as well.
