Red Queen's race

The Red Queen's race is an incident that appears in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass" and involves the Red Queen, a representation of a Queen in chess, and Alice constantly running but remaining in the same spot.

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run 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!" [http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=CarGlas.sgm&
]

The Red Queen's race is often used to illustrate similar situations:
* Isaac Asimov used it in his short story "The Red Queen's Race" to illustrate the concept of predestination paradox.
* Vernor Vinge uses it in his novel "Rainbows End" to denote the struggle between providing security to a society that is progressively educated enough to provide contentment to the masses, but also allows smaller and smaller groups to do great damage.
* As an illustration of the relativistic effect that nothing can ever reach the speed of light, or the invariant speed.Fact|date=July 2007
* In evolutionary biology, to illustrate that sexual reproduction and the resulting genetic recombination may be just enough to allow individuals of a certain species to adapt to changes in the ecological niche they occupy - see Red Queen.