Red Queen Race

Accordingly, the metaphor Red Queen represents the situation in nature where creatures must adapt quickly to changing environmental threats just to survive from generation to generation. In Through the Looking Glass (Lewis Carroll Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There), Alice complains that she has to run just to stay in the same place.

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, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

References
Bell, G. (1982). The Masterpiece Of Nature: The Evolution and Genetics of Sexuality. University of California Press, Berkeley, 635 pp.

Lewis Carroll. 1960 (reprinted). The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, illustrated by J. Tenniel, with an Introduction and Notes by M. Gardner. The New American Library, New York, 345 pp. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

Dawkins, R. & Krebs, J. R. (1979). Arms races between and within species. Proceedings of the Royal society of London, B 205, 489-511.

Pearson, Paul N. (2001) Red Queen hypothesis Encyclopedia of Life Sciences http://www.els.net

Matt Ridley (1995) The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, Penguin Books, ISBN 0140245480

Leigh Van Valen. (1973). "A new evolutionary law". Evolutionary Theory 1: 1—30.
Vermeij, G.J. (1987). Evolution and escalation: An ecological history of life. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

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