Leigh Van Valen

Proposed by Leigh Van Valen in a 1973 paper, the Red Queen Hypothesis posits that organisms must constantly adapt and evolve just to survive against ever-evolving competitors and predators. It is named after the Red Queen's quote in Lewis Carroll's *Through the Looking-Glass*: "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

Leigh Van Valen spent much of his career as an evolutionary biologist and paleontologist at the University of Chicago. He continued to work and publish his research there from the late 1960s until his death in 2010.

Van Valen's Law of Extinction, also published in 1973, states that the probability of a family or genus going extinct remains constant, regardless of how long it has already existed. This means a lineage's survival rate does not increase with age, a concept derived from analyzing thousands of fossil records.

Frustrated by the traditional peer-review process, Leigh Van Valen founded his own scientific journal named *Evolutionary Theory*. He famously used the journal to publish lengthy, unconventional ideas, and even reviewed his own submissions under pseudonyms.