A Comment on the Red Queen

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Abstract
The Red Queen hypothesis (Van Valen, 1973, 1974) asserts that each evolutionary advance made by one species in an ecosystem is experienced as a deterioration of the environment by other species. This hypothesis leads to a law of constant extinction only if a zero-sum assumption (the gain in fitness of one species is exactly balanced by the sum of losses of fitness of all others) is strictly obeyed. Since there is no reason to expect a zero-sum assumption to hold exactly, an ecosystem may be in one of 2 evolutionary phases: a convergent phase, with the rate of evolution decreasing, or a divergent phase, with evolution accelerating. If one or more species in an ecosystem change their ways of getting a living, this will move the system toward a divergent phase. The law of constant extinction is more plausibly deduced from a zero-sum assumption arising from the constancy of the total resources available to any trophic level in an ecosystem.

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