Red Queen Vs 42.

Red Queen Vs 42.

Ever so often we have all been faced with a situation of having to run in order to stay in the same place. This delightful phrase has its origins in that deep and deceptively bizarre work "Alice through the looking glass".

"Alice looked round her in great surprise. 'Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!'

'Of course it is,' said the Queen. 'What would you have it?'

'Well, in our country, said Alice, still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing.' 'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, here, 1 see. it takes all the running you can do, to keep in ;he same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'"

I have used this phrase so often and felt stupid when I learnt about a fundamental evolutionary principle assocaited with this idea.It is called the Red Queen Principle and it was proposed by the evolutionary biologist L.Van Valen. He argues that since all the species are coevolving, improvement in one species would result in a competitive advantage over the other species. In order to catch up with that and maintain the equilibrium, the other species have to adapt and improve too. Since this would effectively result in all them working harder in order to maintain the same balance among them, he named it the Red queen principle, of course referring to the above character.

One finds the same kind of race between the human body and viruses which is referred to as the "genetic arms race" where as the human body develops resistance for certain types of diseases, the viruses causing the diseases mutate and try to counter the resistance and the race goes on.You can read more here and here and I hope you will find it fascinating.

Perhaps all that we claim as human progress is also finally just a matter of necessity for staying in the race. There was no choice but to run and get better or we might have just perished. Definitely true of organisations and systems that if they do not respond to their external environment they perish. Survival of species is a definitely more competitive game than that.

So it seems that the final answer to Life, Universe and Everything may not be 42 but the Red Queen Principle!