CONCEPT
Red Queen Hypothesis
It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place — organisms must continually evolve merely to maintain fitness as competitors and parasites evolve.
Leigh Van Valen's 1973 Red Queen hypothesis holds that organisms must constantly adapt not to achieve progress but to avoid extinction, because their biotic environment — predators, prey, parasites, competitors — is itself evolving. The metaphor comes from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1871), where the Red Queen tells Alice that in her country, you must run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. The hypothesis explains why evolutionary arms races escalate without producing permanent advantage: prey evolve faster running, predators evolve faster chasing, and neither gains lasting superiority. Dawkins applied the framework to biological arms races (bat echolocation vs moth jamming) and competitive dynamics generally. For AI, the Red Queen explains the compulsive adoption pattern documented in You On AI: builders must use the newest tools to match the pace of competitors, and the pace accelerates as tools improve, producing a self-reinforcing spiral with no internal brake.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Van Valen derived the