The program--known as the clunky "At the Customer, For the Customer"--taps the parent company's wealth of expertise in the vaunted Six Sigma defect-reduction method, just-in-time manufacturing and such management pursuits as succession planning.

FORBES: Money Machine

Moreover, as the chart shows, the rate of change has speeded up over the course of that period. (The sudden fall-off at the end is caused because the linkage-disequilibrium method cannot easily detect very recent mutations, rather than by a sudden reduction in the rate of evolution.) The researchers put this acceleration down to two things.

ECONOMIST: Human evolution