The Red Queen comes to Ordway
Alice and the Red Queen running to stay in place. Credit: Rachel Nabors, Dribble.com They say it's a curse to live in historically interesting times. 'They' were talking about human history, of course. But the same wisdom applies to evolutionary history. Perhaps even more so. Recent ecological events at Ordway have me thinking a lot about the current moment, in the context of evolutionary time. Specifically, my thoughts keep coming back to the Red Queen Hypothesis (RQH). Like many biology students, I first encountered the idea in an undergraduate course on evolutionary biology. It's a bit esoteric, but the details are important. Bear with me. Leigh Van Valen proposed the RQH in the 1970's to explain an unexpected pattern he had found in the fossil record. Van Valen was interested in how long species tended to last over geological time scales. He examined data spanning tens to hundreds of millions of years, from a wide range of organisms: single-celled protists to...