Red Queen Hypothesis

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The Red Queen hypothesis is a hypothesis on evolution that is supposed to explain two phenomena: the advantage of sexual reproduction , which is actually ineffective from an evolutionary perspective, and the constant "arms race" between competing organisms (parasite host, prey hunter).

hypothesis

The hypothesis was proposed in 1973 by Leigh Van Valen , from whom it borrowed Lewis Carroll's Alice Behind the Looking Glass. The Red Queen, who appears in it, explains to the curious Alice: "In this country you have to run as fast as you can if you want to stay in the same place." Van Valen compared the duration of his work (between the first and last documentation in the fossil record, approximated between Species formation and extinction) of members from around 50 large, different groups of organisms. He observed that the group's risk of extinction at a certain point in time is independent of the previous period of existence, i.e. the geological age of the group. Some versions of the theory of evolution would be more likely to predict that a long-standing group is much less likely to die out, given that it has had much more time to adapt perfectly to the environment. Van Valen remarked that the actual environmental conditions for each group evidently change at an approximately constant rate (that is, as a rule: worsen), so that a long history of successful adaptations is of no use to the group in the future. So you have to change constantly in order to maintain your position.

The context was often transferred as the Red Queen Effect or Van Valen's law from the consideration of macroevolutionary relationships to other areas, for example to the co-evolutionary "arms race", e.g. B. between predators and prey or host and parasite. The phenomenon was also used to explain the differences between the sexes as a result of sexual selection . Changes in one sex that increase the likelihood of mating lead to reactions from the opposite sex, so that the basic conditions hardly change with constant changes in the details.

The evolutionary biologist Graham Bell transferred the image of the Red Queen in 1980 to the benefits of sexual reproduction in general: On a microevolutionary level, sexual reproduction, which turns all offspring into experimental mixtures of the parents' genes , allows faster adaptation, which enables a species to keep a conquered ecological niche .

Van Valen's thesis in its original context (the duration of existence of genera or families in geological epochs) was later criticized by other researchers, who believe they can observe a connection between the duration of existence and the probability of extinction from their data.

However, the image of language that Van Valen shaped is firmly established in the language of science. For example, a red queen mechanism is described for volunteer work in public goods games .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ L. van Valen: A new evolutionary law. In: Evolutionary Theory. Volume 1, 1973, pp. 1-30.
  2. ^ Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll: Alice in the mirror land . Ed .: World Public Library Association. Sesam-Verlag, Vienna / Leipzig / New York 1923, Chapter II: The Garden of Living Flowers, p. 26 (English: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There . London 1871. Translated by Helen Scheu-Riesz).
  3. ^ An overview: GA Parker: Sexual conflict over mating and fertilization: an overview. In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Series B. Volume 361, pp. 235-259. doi: 10.1098 / rstb.2005.1785
  4. ↑ G. Bell: The Masterpiece Of Nature: The Evolution and Genetics of Sexuality. University of California Press, Berkeley 1982.
  5. ↑ an overview: Seth Finnegan, Jonathan L. Payne, Steve C. Wang: The Red Queen revisited: reevaluating the age selectivity of Phanerozoic marine genus extinctions. In: Paleobiology. Volume 34, 3, 2008, pp. 318-341.
  6. ↑ Christoph Hauert, Silvia De Monte, Josef Hofbauer, Karl Sigmund: Volunteering as Red Queen Mechanism for Cooperation in Public Goods Games . In: Science . No. 296 , March 10, 2002, p. 1129–1132 , doi : 10.1126 / science.1070582 (and much more edu [PDF; 345 kB ; accessed on September 15, 2015]).