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The Red Queen Passage of Lewis Caroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass”

In chapter II Alice meets the Red Queen who–except for Alice–is the only being in the Garden of Live Flowers able to move about. Alice tells the queen of her desire to travel to the top of a hill in the distance. There they see, on the other side, a valley laid out like a chessboard. This prompts Alice to exclaim “It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played–all over the world–if this is the world at all, you know.” [...]

March 1st, 2010 | Category: Genetics | Leave a comment

The Red Queen Hypothesis of Selective Adaptation

The Red Queen Hypothesis is based on a passage from Chapter II of Charles Dodgen’s (under the pen name of Lewis Carroll) 1871 book “Through the Looking-Glass.” The principle set forth by this hypothesis was formalized, slightly more than a century later–in 1973–by Leigh van Valen, in a paper published in Evolutionary Theory, entitled “A New Evolutionary Law.” In Dr. van Valen’s words: “For an evolutionary system, continued development is needed just to maintain its fitness relative to the systems it is co-evolving with.” This is counterintuitive. We presume an evolutionary development in a species to be, intrinsically, a move “upward.” Yet, if that development merely counters an adversarial development in a competing organism, stasis (lateral movement that maintains the status quo), and nothing more, results… [...]

March 1st, 2010 | Category: Genetics | Leave a comment