"Recall that someone with only casual knowledge about the problems of randomness would believe that an animal is at the maximum fitness for the conditions of its time. This is not what evolution means; on average, animals will be fit, but not every single one of them, and not at all times. Just as an animal could have survived because its sample path was lucky, the "best" operators in a given business can come from a subset of operators who survived because of overfitness to a sample path--a sample path that was free of the evolutionary rare event. One vicious attribute is that the longer these animals can go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it. We said that should one extend time to infinity, then, by ergodicity, that event will happen with certainty--the species will be wiped out! For evolution means fitness to one and only one time series, not the average of all the possible environments."