The principle of zero change in success rate, no matter how great the evolutionary progress in equipment, has been given the memorable name of the ‘Red Queen effect’ by the American biologist Leigh van Valen.
In Through the Looking Glass, you will remember, the Red Queen seized Alice by the hand and dragged her, faster and faster, on a frenzied run through the countryside, but no matter how fast they ran they always stayed in the same place.
Alice was understandably puzzled, saying, ‘Well in our country 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!’ The Red Queen label is amusing, but it can be misleading if taken (as it sometimes is) to mean something mathematically precise, literally zero relative progress.
Another misleading feature is that in the Alice story the Red Queen’s statement is genuinely paradoxical, irrecon– cilable with common sense in the real physical world.
But van Valen’s evolutionary Red Queen effect is not paradoxical at all.
It is entirely in accordance with common sense, so long as common sense is intelligently applied.
If not paradoxical, however, arms races can give rise to situations that strike the economically minded human as wasteful.
Why, for instance, are trees in forests so tall?
The short answer is that all the other trees are tall, so no one tree can afford not to be.
It would be overshadowed if it did.
This is essentially the truth, but it offends the economically minded human.
It seems so pointless, so wasteful.
When all the trees are the full height of the canopy, all are approximately equally exposed to the sun, and none could afford to be any shorter.
But if only they were all shorter, if only there could be some sort of trade–union agreement to lower the recognized height of the canopy in forests, all the trees would benefit.
They would be competing with each other in the canopy for exactly the same sunlight, but they would all have ‘paid’ much smaller growing costs to get into the canopy.