The ICLE 'Moore's Law' white paper invokes the Red Queen only as Lewis Carroll's literary image, not as Van Valen's biological formalism

The ICLE white paper "From Moore's Law to Market Rivalry" (Albrecht, Manne, Teece, Zúñiga; ICLE, November 12, 2025) uses "Red Queen" exactly once, and sources it explicitly to the Lewis Carroll story rather than to evolutionary biology: firms "must constantly innovate simply to maintain their relative position, much like the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's tale, who must run constantly just to stay in place." A second, unlabeled echo of the same image appears later, in the paper's discussion of technology races — competition that "forces firms to 'run fast' just to stay in place."

Neither passage names Leigh Van Valen, the Red Queen hypothesis as a scientific construct, the "Law of Extinction," or any extinction-probability or hazard-rate concept. A full-text pass of the 46-page PDF — executive summary, capital-risk analysis, specialization/foundry history, dynamic-capabilities section, and policy conclusion — turned up no biological or evolutionary-theory reference beyond this single literary allusion.

This distinction matters because the vault reached the paper through a cross-domain bridge: Rock's Law forces chipmakers into a perpetual capital arms-race (claim-rocks-law-is-moores-laws-economic-inverse), which has the same "run to stay in place" shape as the Red Queen (claim-red-queen-hypothesis-names-running-to-stay-in-place). Van Valen's law, however, is a specific quantitative claim (constant, age-independent extinction probability), whereas ICLE deploys the phrase as rhetorical color. The paper is therefore evidence that the ICLE framing borrows Carroll's metaphor, not Van Valen's model — bearing directly on question-does-competition-for-the-market-map-onto-red-queen-extinction-probability. Where ICLE does ground its argument in a named academic framework, it reaches for industrial-organization economics, not biology (claim-icle-grounds-competition-for-the-market-in-industrial-organization-economics).