The Red Queen

In Alice through the Looking Glass the character of the The Red Queen appears as a representation of a chess piece. She has become a popular object of metaphor as a result of the dream-like scene in which she seizes Alice by the shoulder in order that they can run together very fast in a desperate attempt to keep up with the landscape. She then advises Alice that in order to get anywhere else, as opposed to merely remaining in the same place, one must run at least twice as fast.

The metaphor has been found appropriate for the descriptions of arms races. These comparisons may be made in the fields of military hardware, competition in commercial product markets and competition between people in society for wealth or esteem, but, most famously, the idea was introduced by Leigh van Valen[?] to the discussion of arms races in the biological theory of evolution by natural selection.

The recognition of a simple example of a biological arms race (from Richard Dawkins) can be achieved by considering the contrast between two adaptations of the polar bear. This animal has a coat of hair which is thick to help the bear survive the cold of the arctic and white in order that the bear can stalk seals for food. For the first case the selection pressure is likely to be constant or subject to random change, in the second case the selection pressure is likely to increase steadily as selection for cautiousness in seals makes the average seal harder and harder for the bear to stalk successfully. As a result both the bear and the seal find themselves running a red queen's race over evolutionary time, each becoming better and better adapted (to stealth and caution respectively) but neither becoming any more successful (as they are engaged in a zero sum game).

The science writer Matt Ridley wrote a book The Red Queen in which he discussed the debate in theoretical biology over the adaptive benefit of sexual reproduction to those species in which it appears. The connection of the Red Queen to this debate arises from the fact that the traditionally accepted theory (The Vicar of Bray) only showed adaptive benefit at the level of the species or group, not at the level of the gene. By contrast, a Red-Queen-type theory that organisms are running cyclic arms races with their parasites can explain the utility of sexual reproduction at the level of the gene by positing that the role of sex is to preserve genes which are currently disadvantageous, but which will become advantageous against the background of a likely future population of parasites.