ABSTRACT
In Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking Glass, Alice is running in pace with the Red Queen, who is a living chess piece. Alice says, “Well, in our country, you’d generally get somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time as we’ve been doing.” The Red Queen responds, “A slow sort of country! 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!” The concept has been applied to evolution in the hypothesis that organisms must constantly adapt, evolve, and reproduce in order to survive against a world where its enemies are becoming more efficient at destroying you. In this chapter, mostly based on material from Matt Ridley’s book The Red Queen, we will examine the Red Queen effect operating in nature and how sexual reproduction has advantages over asexual reproduction in a species survival. The Red Queen effect is as important to humans as it is to other animals. During our evolutionary history, we spend the earliest periods as a prey animal but then became a predator ourselves. However, the microorganism world may be even more important than the macro world. Parasites, bacteria, and viruses have been and still are stressors that influence our destiny.
