Joachim Andersen

Accelerated Learning

The Red Queen Effect: Why You Have to Keep Running Just to Stay in Place

A queen in a red velvet gown with thin gold trim and a small gold crown runs hand in hand with a blonde girl in a pale blue dress down a black and gold chessboard path through a lantern lit garden at night
The Red Queen Effect illustrated by Alice and the Red Queen running as fast as they can, only to stay in the same place.


The Red Queen Effect describes a world where standing still means falling behind. When the rivals, attackers or parasites around me keep adapting, I have to keep improving just to hold my position. It explains why progress so often feels like running on the spot, and helps me decide which races are worth running at all.

The essence of the Red Queen Effect is to ask: “Who or what am I really competing against, and are they improving faster than I am?”


Origin: From Looking-Glass Land to the Fossil Record

In 1871, Lewis Carroll published Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. In the second chapter, Alice runs hand in hand with the Red Queen as fast as she can, only to find that they are still under the same tree. The Queen explains: “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!”

A century later, the evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen borrowed the scene. In A New Evolutionary Law (1973), he plotted how long more than 25,000 groups of extinct organisms had survived. Within each group, the chance of going extinct stayed roughly constant, no matter how long the group had already existed. His explanation, which he called the Red Queen’s Hypothesis, was that every species lives in an environment made largely of other species. Any gain for one is a loss for the others, so all must keep evolving just to survive.

In 1996, the Stanford professor William Barnett and Morten Hansen brought the idea to business. Studying banks in Illinois, they described how competition pushes a company to learn and improve, which makes its rivals stronger, which in turn pushes the company to learn again.


Key Concepts

  • Relative, Not Absolute
    What counts is not how good I am, but how good I am compared with those I compete with. Van Valen saw life as a contest for a fixed amount of resources, the kind of zero-sum game I explore in Game Theory.

  • Coevolution and Arms Races
    In 1979, Richard Dawkins and John Krebs described how predators and prey, or parasites and hosts, push each other into escalating arms races, where every adaptation on one side selects for a counter-adaptation on the other.

  • The Life-Dinner Principle
    Arms races are rarely even. As Dawkins and Krebs put it, after Aesop: “The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner.” The side with more to lose tends to adapt faster, a close cousin of Skin in the Game.

  • Age Is No Shield
    Van Valen’s law runs against The Lindy Effect. For books and ideas, a long life can predict a longer one, but for the groups in his data, having survived for millions of years gave little protection against the next rival.

  • The Competency Trap
    Barnett and Hansen found that recent competition made banks stronger, while lessons learned from rivals long ago could backfire. Facing many different kinds of rivals at once also made it harder to learn the right lessons.


Some Examples

  • Newts and Garter Snakes
    The rough-skinned newt of western North America carries enough tetrodotoxin in its skin to kill several adult humans, yet the common garter snake eats it. In 2002, Shana Geffeney and colleagues showed that the snakes have evolved toxin-resistant sodium channels in their muscles, with resistance varying from place to place. The resistance has a price: Edmund Brodie Jr. and Edmund Brodie III found that the most resistant snakes also crawl more slowly.

  • Worms, Parasites and Sex
    W. D. Hamilton argued that sex may exist to stay ahead of parasites, as shuffling genes every generation turns a species into a moving target. In 2011, Levi Morran and colleagues tested this on the tiny roundworm C. elegans, which can either fertilize itself or mate. Faced with a bacterium that was allowed to evolve alongside them, every population forced to self-fertilize went extinct within 20 generations, while those that mated survived. Against a bacterium that could not evolve, the self-fertilizers did fine.

  • CAPTCHAs
    In 2003, Luis von Ahn and colleagues introduced CAPTCHAs, distorted text that humans could read, but computers could not. Spammers built better software, sites distorted the text more, and the puzzles got hard for humans too. In 2013, a Google team showed that a neural network could solve the hardest category of reCAPTCHA puzzles with 99.8% accuracy, and the next year Google began judging how visitors behave instead.

  • The Dreadnought
    In 1906, Britain launched HMS Dreadnought, the first all-big-gun battleship. It was a triumph, but it made every existing battleship obsolete, including Britain’s own, and reset the naval race almost to zero. Germany set out to build its own, and Britain stayed ahead only by building ever more and bigger ships.


Applying the Red Queen Effect

When I want to use this mental model, this is the simple process I follow:

  1. Identify Who Is Adapting
    I ask who or what is adapting against me: competitors, attackers, algorithms or for instance other candidates for the same job.

  2. Measure Relative Progress
    I compare my rate of improvement with theirs, as well as with my own past. You should be cognizant that getting better can still mean falling behind, in some cases.

  3. Budget for Maintenance
    I set aside time and money just to keep pace, like reading up and trying out developing tech & ways of working, and keeping my skills current.

  4. Stay a Moving Target
    Like the worms that mate, I try to keep some variety and change in what I do (read and learn broadly), so others find it harder to copy or exploit me.

  5. Learn from Today’s Rivals
    To avoid the competency trap, I check what portion of my lessons come from the competitors I face now, and which portion comes from old battles.

  6. Choose or Change the Race/Game
    If a race/game only burns resources, I look for a way out. In 1922, the Washington Naval Treaty set a 5:5:3 ratio for the American, British and Japanese navies and halted new battleships, though a new race soon began in cruisers, which it left open.


Pitfalls and Limitations

  • Not everything is a Red Queen. In 2001, the paleontologist Anthony Barnosky found that for mammals in the northern Rocky Mountains over millions of years, changes in climate, which he called the Court Jester, mattered more than competition between species.

  • Van Valen’s law is not exact. In 2008, Seth Finnegan and colleagues reexamined marine fossils and found that young genera were more likely to go extinct than older ones, so age does offer some protection.

  • It can justify a pointless race/game. When everyone runs harder for the same relative position, as in The Prisoner’s Dilemma, all can end up worse off. Escalation can also leave a species or a company specialized and fragile, like the slower snakes. Sometimes the better move is to cooperate,/co-opetition, or to compete on a different dimension (blue ocean strategy).

  • Business is not biology. Companies can merge, cooperate, change the rules or leave, so I use the idea as a lens, not a law.


Related Mental Models

The Red Queen Effect reminds me that in a world of adapting rivals, standing still is a way of falling behind. By measuring my progress against those I actually compete with, budgeting for the running it takes to stay in place, and choosing my races/games with care, I can keep up where it matters and step off the treadmill where it doesn’t.



To learn more about mental models and philosophy,
check out: Wise: How to Attain a Deep Understanding of the World, History, Our Place in It, and How to Live Well



📚 Sources and References


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