Contents
If you have been successful for a long time, you feel safe. Experience, size and tradition seem to protect you. In 1973, an American paleontologist contradicted this intuition with data from millions of years of Earth’s history. His idea, the origin of the Red Queen Effect, has long since spread beyond biology and today also explains why companies and organizations have to stay constantly on the move.
A paleontologist counts extinctions
Situation
Leigh Van Valen did research at the University of Chicago on the evolution of mammals and on fundamental questions of evolutionary theory. He analyzed published data on the life spans of tens of thousands of genera in the fossil record and compiled, for many groups of organisms, how long individual genera and families had existed before they died out. From this he drew survival curves. The result was surprising: within a group, the probability of dying out remained roughly the same over long periods. It did not depend on how old a genus already was. Van Valen called this a new evolutionary law.
Link to the principle
Age offers no protection. A species that has already survived 10 million years is no safer than a young one. What was enough to survive in the past is no guarantee for the future.
Why success does not last
Situation
Van Valen explained his finding with competition between species. Every improvement in one species worsens the situation of the others that compete with it for food and habitat or are hunted by it. The predators get faster, and so does the prey. The parasites get more skillful, and the hosts more resistant. Overall, no one gains a lasting lead. Those that do not keep evolving fall behind and die out.
Link to the principle
This is the core of the Red Queen Effect. A species’ environment consists above all of other species, and they do not stand still. Standing still is therefore not a neutral state but a step backward.
The name from a children’s book
Situation
For his idea, Van Valen drew on Lewis Carroll’s book “Through the Looking-Glass” from 1871. In it, Alice runs with the Red Queen as fast as she can and yet stays in the same place. The Queen explains to her: “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!” Van Valen published his essay “A New Evolutionary Law” in 1973 as the first article in the journal Evolutionary Theory, which he had founded himself.
Link to the principle
The image shows what makes the principle so uncomfortable. All that effort does not get you ahead; it only holds your position.
From biology to organizations
Situation
The idea was carried further. The biologist Graham Bell and the evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton used it to explain why sexual reproduction exists: it constantly produces new combinations and so helps in the race against parasites. The science writer Matt Ridley made the concept widely known in 1993 with his book “The Red Queen.” The organizational researcher William P. Barnett applied it to companies: firms that face tough competition grow stronger because the competition forces them to learn.
Link to the principle
In markets, the same holds as in nature. The competition learns, customers change their expectations, and every advance by a competitor shifts the standard for everyone.
Limits of the law
Situation
Van Valen’s law is not undisputed. Later work showed that the risk of extinction depends heavily on a group’s ecological niche. The Court Jester hypothesis emphasizes that, in the long run, external factors such as climate and geology drive evolution more than the race between species does. Many of the great waves of extinction also go back to climate change, volcanism or meteorite impacts – that is, to external events and not to competition between species.
Link to the principle
The Red Queen Effect does not explain everything. Besides the constant race, there are shocks from outside that no amount of speed can counter. For organizations, this means: keep improving and at the same time be prepared for disruptions.
Key takeaways
Key lessons
- Don’t count on your past success to protect you.
- Assume that your competitors are learning today.
- Don’t confuse holding your position with progress.
- If you want to get ahead, you have to learn faster than the others.
- Besides the race, watch out for shocks from outside.
Summary
In 1973, Leigh Van Valen found in the fossil record that a group’s age does not protect it from extinction. He explained this with a constant race between species and named it after Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen: you have to run to stay in the same place. Today the idea shapes biology and organizational research. It is a reminder that in competition, standing still means falling behind.
Sources
- Leigh Van Valen: A New Evolutionary Law. In: Evolutionary Theory 1 (1973), pp. 1–30.
- Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. London: Macmillan, 1871.
- William P. Barnett: The Red Queen among Organizations: How Competitiveness Evolves. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.
- Matt Ridley: The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. London: Viking, 1993.
