All the Running You Can Do

There’s a scene in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass where Alice finds herself running hand-in-hand with the Red Queen, faster and faster, trees and landmarks streaming past — and yet, when they finally stop, she’s standing under the very same tree she started from. Baffled and out of breath, she protests that back home, running that hard would take you somewhere. The Queen is unimpressed: “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!”

It reads like nonsense — a bit of Victorian whimsy. But in 1973 an evolutionary biologist named Leigh Van Valen realized that the Red Queen had accidentally described one of the deepest patterns in nature, and he borrowed her name for it. The Red Queen effect is what happens whenever the thing you’re competing against can adapt right back at you — and once you can see it, you’ll find it everywhere your intuition was quietly getting things wrong.

The one idea to take away

Here’s the entire model in a single line, before we spend the course earning it:

The hinge of the whole idea is a distinction that sounds obvious but that almost nobody applies in the heat of competition: the difference between an absolute gain and a relative one. Absolute improvement is “I got faster, stronger, cheaper, better than I was.” Relative position is “I pulled ahead of my rival.” In a normal, fixed environment — learning to swim, paying off a debt, climbing a hill — those two are the same thing: improve, and you’re better off. But when your environment is made of other agents who improve in response, they come apart violently. You can run flat out, genuinely get better every year, and end the decade no further ahead than you started, because everyone you’re racing did the same.

That gazelle is going to follow us through the course, because it’s the cleanest possible case: a coevolutionary race where both sides improve, both sides genuinely change, and the gap that actually matters refuses to move. You just predicted that outcome without knowing a single fact about cheetah biology — that’s what the model buys you.

Watch the race that goes nowhere

Reading about a treadmill is one thing; watching two competitors sprint up it is another. Below is a coevolution race between you and a rival. Each generation, both of you improve — and crucially, whichever one is behind pushes harder to catch up, so your two lines climb in near-lockstep. Press Auto-run (or advance a generation at a time) and watch the two capability lines soar upward together while the relative-advantage meter below them barely twitches off centre. That’s the paradox: enormous absolute progress, near-zero relative change.

Then try the button that teaches the other half of the model. Press Stop running (opt out) and watch what happens to a competitor who decides the treadmill isn’t worth it.

Two things are worth burning in while you play. First, running flat out keeps the meter near the centre — both of you improve hugely, neither pulls ahead. That feels like wasted effort, and it’s the trap we’ll spend a whole lesson on: it is not wasted, because the alternative is the second thing. Second, the moment you opt out, the gap yawns open against you — the rival keeps climbing, your flat line falls relatively behind, and you lose. So you can’t win the relative race by running, but you can lose it instantly by stopping. That tension — running buys a standstill, stopping buys a collapse — is the engine of the whole model.

Why this belongs in a latticework

The Red Queen earns its place because it’s really two models wearing one name, and they reinforce each other:

• In biology, it’s the engine behind coevolutionary arms races — predator and prey, host and parasite — and even the leading explanation for the single weirdest fact in evolution: why sexual reproduction exists at all. (It’s a defence against parasites. We’ll get there.)
• In strategy and economics, it’s why competitive advantage is so hard to hold: a clever efficiency gets copied, a feature war neutralizes everyone, and rivals match your every move until the whole industry is more capable and nobody is further ahead. “We have to keep innovating just to stay in business” is the Red Queen, spoken by a CEO.

Both halves share one diagnostic question, the one this whole course trains you to ask: Is this an absolute gain that sticks, or a relative race where my rivals will erase it? Get that wrong — mistake running on the treadmill for getting somewhere — and you’ll pour effort into improvements that vanish the moment the competition matches them.

The map of the course

Five teaching lessons, then one exam you can’t undo. The route:

1. Running to Stay in Place — Van Valen’s law and the heart of the model: what coevolution is, and the absolute-versus-relative distinction built up with real numbers, so “the gap stays the same” becomes something you can count.
2. Coevolutionary Arms Races — the great biological duels: predator vs. prey, the relentless host–parasite war, the “life–dinner” asymmetry, escalation and its costs — and the startling Red Queen explanation for why sex exists.
3. The Treadmill Trap — the misconception that fools nearly everyone: mistaking absolute improvement for progress when the baseline is moving. Positional vs. absolute goods, when running is worth it, and when to step off the treadmill.
4. The Red Queen in Business & Strategy — the payoff in the boardroom: why operational effectiveness isn’t strategy, feature wars, antibiotics vs. resistance, spam vs. filters, and how to change a game instead of just running faster in it.
5. (Recap & synthesis woven through the above and the exam.)

Then a Final Exam — graded, one question at a time, one-way: once you answer, it locks. No back button, no retries, 70% to pass.

How to use this course

One habit does most of the work: every time you see a “we improved!” claim, ask compared to what, and is the competition improving too? Treat each exercise the way you should treat the gazelle — guess the outcome before you reveal the answer, because the small sting of being wrong is what makes the absolute-versus-relative distinction finally stick. And play with the coevolution race above until the two patterns — climbing lines, motionless meter — feel obvious in your gut. A treadmill you’ve watched go nowhere sticks far better than one you’ve only read about.

Next up: lesson 2, where we meet Leigh Van Valen, pin down what coevolution actually means, and turn “all the running you can do” into numbers you can add up yourself.