The Great Mental Models, Volume 2 by Shane Parrish & Rhiannon Beaubien

Author:Shane Parrish & Rhiannon Beaubien [Parrish, Shane & Beaubien, Rhiannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Long Live the Red Queen

The Red Queen effect is a compelling principle of evolutionary biology and vivid image to help understand the pressures that all organisms face just in surviving.

The least fit of a species dies first. You can’t stop adapting because no one around you is stopping. If you do, your competitive position declines, bringing your survival into question. Every living thing is constantly on the lookout for opportunity, the place to accrue advantage, and thus adaptation is also driven as a response to changes in those with whom we share our environment. Staying the same as we are often means falling behind.

The Red Queen effect was first used in the context of evolutionary biology by Leigh Van Valen in 1973. In his research, he noticed something interesting: that at no point was a species protected from extinction. Evolution is an ongoing process, and all species must continually respond to pressures in their environment or die off. What’s more, constant adaptation is something that everyone is doing all the time. Hence the use of the Lewis Carroll character from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Red Queen tells Alice, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”[16]

At the biological level, organisms don’t choose to adapt. A leopard doesn’t sit up one day and say, “Wow, the antelope are getting faster. I need to do something about that.” Rather, the increased speed of the prey means that only the fastest predators will get food and live long enough to reproduce. Thus, over time, the average speed of the predator species increases. The pressures on both the predator and prey are constant, which is what produces the Red Queen effect.

However, this principle applies to the much smaller timescale of our lives as well. And, importantly, we can choose to do something about it. There are so many humans on the planet that even if only 20 percent were trying to move ahead, it’s enough that they wouldn’t leave much behind for the rest of us. There are enough people trying to get smarter, better, and more of the limited resources that are available, that it puts direct pressure on everyone to keep up.

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