The Red Queen's race is an incident that appears in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass and involves the Red Queen, a representation of a Queen in chess, and Alice constantly running but remaining in the same spot.
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run 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's race is often used to illustrate similar situations:
- Isaac Asimov used it in his short story "The Red Queen's Race" to illustrate the concept of predestination paradox.
- Vernor Vinge uses it in his novel Rainbows End to illustrate the struggle between encouraging technological advancement and protecting the world from new weapons technologies.
- As an illustration of the relativistic effect that nothing can ever reach the speed of light, or the invariant speed; in particular, with respect to relativistic effect on light from galaxies near the edge of the expanding observable universe, or at the event horizon of a black hole.
- In evolutionary biology, to illustrate that sexual reproduction and the resulting genetic recombination may be just enough to allow individuals of a certain species to adapt to changes in their environment - see Red Queen's Hypothesis.
Famous quotes containing the words red, queen and/or race:
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“[The Settlement House] must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.”
—Jane Addams (1860–1935)