Chasing The Red Queen
Hamilton was an early proponent of the Red Queen theory of the evolution of sex, first proposed by Leigh Van Valen. This was named for a character in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, who is continuously running but never actually travels any distance:
- "Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "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!" (Carroll, pp. 46)
This theory hypothesizes that sex evolved because new and unfamiliar combinations of genes could be presented to parasites, preventing the parasite from preying on that organism: species with sex were able to continuously "run away" from their parasites. Likewise, parasites were able to evolve mechanisms to get around the organism's new set of genes, thus perpetuating an endless race.
Read more about this topic: W. D. Hamilton
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