There should be nothing "shocking" about what has happened at Enron. Marker evolution is inevitable in all physical systems, and the simple cure for it is to periodically change the markers.


Marker evolution is a simple byproduct of evolution under imperfect information conditions. Suppose the survival of an entity is contingent on a decision based on a certain piece of information, which is expensive to get.


Suppose there is another piece of indirect information which is cheaper to get, but is correlated to the "direct" data. There will be a higher rate of survival among entities which evolve to use the cheaper "marker" - which is an adequate window into the hidden, underlying condition.


Next, in a sexual sense, the entity being judged will survive not based on the actual condition of the direct data, but based on the appearance of the marker. So, the once-correlated marker will evolve to be further and further away from the condition it is supposed to be a window into, it will become free-floating like a peacpock's tail.


So what you end up with is businesses, or creatures which evolve elaborate markers - pretty faces, or names like wirelessgenomics.com - at the expense of evolution of actual desirable characteristics, which are more expensive to evolve than markers anyway.


I even saw a male fish on TV once that could make itself look like a female on one side, and insert itself between a male and female having sex. Or, you have, like blue-footed boobies, and so forth. Naturally, natural selection would eventually produce a "darling of Wall St." that was a darling nowhere but on the paper Wall St. had grown to rely upon for selection.


So suppose a girl's face is a good window into the condition of her ovaries, her stride, her ability to carry and care for children. A few thousand years later, you're left with a population of pleasant-faced girls with curved spines, knocked knees, and mean dispositions.


All you gotta do is now and then say "Hey, for the next five years, I'm gonna chase girls with nice asses, or pretty hands, or something - ignore the face!"


Over a period which is too short for it to evolve, a cheap marker is a better window into an underlying condition than an expensive firtshand examination. But then, discovering and changing markes is expensive too, so the only way to choose survivors is but an occasional culling, meaning individuals bloodlines cannot evolve to anticpate and fend off their own demise, rather they are killed off at random.


No matter how much you know about the laws of natural selection, it is difficult to improve your own lot.


eLROY