Deep thoughts and silliness

Leigh Van Valen (who died last month) is well known for being an original thinker. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the only way he could publish his most famous idea was to start a journal to print it in. Because of this, the paper is devilishly hard to get hold of: I managed to get a photocopy, with only one page of references missing.
This idea dates back to 1973, and is now called the “Red Queen hypothesis”: that fitness is constant over time because of continual changes in the environment. Although this is the way the hypothesis is stated, it is a subtle mis-representation of the original idea. This is because it has been morphed into something a bit different, when the idea was ripped from its palaeontological roots into the world of population and evolutionary genetics.

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Physicists have it easy. When they’re not talking about stuffing their hands into their equipment, they’re measuring their fundamental constants to 38 significant figures. Chemists too have a simple time – they get to make stinks and bangs with expensive toys. But at least they know exactly what they get. Even most biologists are lucky – the crowd who do the molecular stuff are like chemists, but a bit less stinky. But us poor ecologists, who have to work with the real world…

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