the "Friend Trap"

Selective pressures come in many forms, and many are figments of our imagination. The biological term I have heard for this is:

"Invoking the ghost of competitions past"

What caused the present state of affairs is generally more complicated than we can know.

Consider those peacocks with the bigger tail eyes. If the chicks do better, what does that mean? Are the females choosing bigger tail eyes because the chicks will do better? Do the chicks do better because of bigger tail eyes?

Probably it IS true that females choose bigger tail eyes because those that do tend to produce more or better offspring, so the trait of choosing bigger tail eyes is reinforced. As for bigger tail eyes producing better eggs, that's probably a case of autocorrelation or some such. Better nutrition may produce better tail eyes, and may mean better eggs. etc. The tail eyes are nothing but a readily identifiable indicator of some other superior fitness trait.

However, if the female begins selecting for tail eyes because it is an identifiable indicator of fitness, any alteration that exagerates the indicator would be selected for, even if the underlying fitness trait was not altered. On the other hand, if the underlying fitness trait was deprecated, while the identifiable indicator was exagerated, it seems likely that selection for the indicator would eventually diminish.

My experience with complex GA's is that they will find a solution to the question asked, but they are more likely to show you the limits of your comprehension of the question rather than giving you an answer with any intrinsic value. You run the program to understand the question, not to get an answer.