#biology # [[Epistemic status]] #schroedinger-uncertain # Red Queen ![[DALL·E 2022-06-19 13.57.51 - The Red Queen competition between man and artificial intelligence, digital art.png]] The Red Queen Hypothesis is closely related to competition, the name comes from the famous book of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll: [Through the Looking Glass](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1503250210/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=farnamstreet-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1503250210&linkId=11252cac0596afce3adde0ece8c6d9af) In Through the Looking Glass, Alice, a young girl, is taught by the Red Queen an important life lesson that many of us ignore. Alice finds herself running faster and faster while staying in the same place. >Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying ‘Faster! Faster!’ but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had not breath left to say so. ![[DALL·E 2022-06-19 14.09.00 - Alice trying to catch-up with the Red Queen, an endless run, digital art by Escher.png]] >The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. ‘I wonder if all the things move along with us?’ thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, ‘Faster! Don’t try to talk!’ Finally, the queen stops running and pushes Alice against a tree, telling her to rest. >Alice looked round her in great surprise. ‘Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!’ ‘Of course it is,’ said the Queen, ‘what would you have it?’ ‘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!’ **The Red Queen theory tries to explain why competition makes evolution thrive and tries to find the reason there are sexes.** A prey must constantly adapt to the evolution of its predators and its predators must constantly adapt to its evolution, the same goes for the host in relation to parasites or even males in relation to females. Here's a simulation I did of the Red Queen effect, unintentionally, https://youtu.be/GqquQTyQLno It was an ecosystem of herbivorous and carnivorous collective intelligence evolving in competition using [[Reinforcement Learning]]. Thus, one intelligence getting better was forcing the other intelligence to improve in order to survive. --- - Sex is interesting when there is genetic variety. - It allows exploring unknown grounds, [[Philosophy/Rationality/Models/Exploration vs exploitation|Exploration vs exploitation]]. - Love of the unknown, [[Philosophy/Rationality/Risk|risk]], [[Philosophy/Rationality/Models/Antifragility|antifragility]] - Similar to curiosity in [[Reinforcement Learning]] ? Exploration vs exploitation there is a branch of RL that introduces the concept of exploration vs exploitation, build a model of the environment and when meeting new things, need to be open-minded to challenge its model ⇾ sex is exploration Sex creates the immune system Sexual = 2 or more sexes, cannot breed with themselves[[Adversarial Reinforcement Learning]] [[Parasites]] [[Predators]] Sex is intriguing when there is genetic variety. It allows exploring unknown grounds [[Philosophy/Rationality/Models/Antifragility|antifragility]] >The idea of genes in conflict with each other, the notion of the genome as a sort of battlefield between parental genes and childhood genes, or between male genes and female genes, is a little-known story outside a small group of evolutionary biologists. Yet it has profoundly shaken the philosophical foundations of biology. > ~ [[Matt Ridley]]