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Red Queen hypothesis

Syllabification: (Red Queen hy·po·the·sis)
Biology
Definition of Red Queen hypothesis
  • the hypothesis that organisms are constantly struggling to keep up with one another in an evolutionary race between predator and prey species.

Origin:

late 20th century: named from a passage in Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking Glass, in which the Red Queen tells Alice that “it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place.”

Red Queen hypothesis in other Oxford dictionaries

Definition of Red Queen hypothesis in the British & World English dictionary