Red Queen Effect

Red Queen hypothesis - Wikipedia | Van Valen, “A New Evolutionary Law” (1973) | The Red Queen Effect - Farnam Street

The Red Queen Effect originates from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass” (1871), where the Red Queen tells Alice: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen formalized this as the Red Queen Hypothesis in his 1973 paper “A New Evolutionary Law,” published in the first volume of Evolutionary Theory. He showed that the probability of extinction stays constant regardless of how long a species has existed, because organisms must continuously evolve just to maintain their relative fitness against co-evolving competitors and parasites. In business, the effect describes how companies must keep innovating simply to maintain their market position, as competitors adapt in parallel. In the context of AI adoption, the Red Queen Effect implies that adopting AI is not a question of “if” but “when”: organizations that stand still lose ground to those that continuously adapt (see Rewilding Software Engineering).