Carla’s Reviews > The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature > Status Update

The Red Queen's case is that an individual, by having sex, can produce
offspring more likely to survive than an individual that produces clones of itself. The advantage of sex can appear in a single generation because whatever lock is common in one generation will produce among the parasites the key that fits it.

The more successful the parasite's attack, the more the host 's chances of survival will depend on whether it can invent a defense. The better the host defends, the more natural selection will promote the parasites that can overcome the defense. The more dire the emergency for one, the better it will fight. This is truly the world of the Red Queen, where you never win, you only gain a temporary respite.

Pitted against a clone of asexual individuals, a sexual population must inevitably be driven extinct by the clone 's greater productivity unless the clone's genetic drawbacks can appear in time. Itis a race against time. For how long? Curtis Lively has calculated that for every tenfold increase in population size, the advantage of sex is granted six more generations to show its effects or sex will lose the game.

Sexual species shared their newly invented genes among all individuals; asexual ones did not. So sexual species were like groups of inventors pooling their resources.

Asexual ones behaved like groups of jealous inventors who never shared their knowledge, so that steam locomotives were used on roads and horses dragged carts along railways.

This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece that Alice meets in Through the Looking-Glass.

The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress. Life is a chess tournament in which if you win a game, you start the next game with the handicap of a missing pawn.