Evolution as a Constant Arms-Race

One of the peculiar features of history is that time always erodes advantage. Every invention sooner or later leads to a counterinvention. Every success contains the seeds of its own overthrow. Every hegemony comes to an end. Evolutionary history is no different. Progress and success are always relative. When the land was unoccupied by animals, the first amphibian to emerge from the sea could get away with being slow, lumbering, and fishlike, for it had no enemies and no competitors. But if a fish were to take to the land today, it would be gobbled up by a passing fox as surely as a Mongol horde would be wiped out by machine guns. In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.

This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece that Alice meets is in Through the Looking-Glass, who perpetually runs without getting very far because the landscape moves with her. It is an increasingly influential idea in evolutionary theory and one that will recur throughout the book. The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress. Life is a chess tournament in which it you win a game, you start the next game with the handicap of a missing pawn.

Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (2003-05-01)

• evolution
• red queen hypothesis