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Oct 31, 2019
This week’s themeEponyms from fiction
This week’s words
Sinon
grobian
Scheherazade
Red Queen hypothesis
Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen in the 2016 film Alice Through the Looking Glass
Poster: Walt Disney Pictures/IMDb
A.Word.A.Day
with Anu GargRed Queen hypothesis
PRONUNCIATION:
(red kween hy-POTH-uh-sis) 
MEANING:
noun: The hypothesis that organisms must constantly adapt and evolve in order to survive in an evolutionary arms race.
ETYMOLOGY:
Proposed by the biologist Leigh Van Valen (1935-2010). Earliest documented use: 1973.
NOTES:
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass the Red Queen tells Alice: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
Evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen used that as a metaphor to describe how competing species must keep up with one another. For example, in a predator and prey relationship, if the prey evolves to run faster, the predator must keep up or go extinct.
Evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen used that as a metaphor to describe how competing species must keep up with one another. For example, in a predator and prey relationship, if the prey evolves to run faster, the predator must keep up or go extinct.
USAGE:
“The Red Queen hypothesis -- adapt or die -- offers a particularly dour outlook for those who measure their pulse online. Alice never gains any Instagram followers. Her extinction is internet invisibility.”
Kaitlin Phillips; In This Tale of Online Intimacy, the Only Wise Characters Are Luddites; The New York Times; Apr 13, 2017.
Kaitlin Phillips; In This Tale of Online Intimacy, the Only Wise Characters Are Luddites; The New York Times; Apr 13, 2017.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
There is a budding morrow in midnight. -John Keats, poet (31 Oct 1795-1821)
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