---
title: "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"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (the source PDF was read in full at capture time — 46 pages, TLS verified — but the queen's independent re-check is blocked in this headless run, which has no network/fetch access; confirmation rests on the capture's direct read of the primary, not a fresh re-fetch)"
source_url: "https://laweconcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/ICLE-Moores-Law-FINAL-2025-11-12-1.pdf"
source_author: "Brian C. Albrecht, Geoffrey A. Manne, David J. Teece, Mario Zúñiga (ICLE White Paper, 'From Moore's Law to Market Rivalry')"
source_date: "2025-11-12T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "The result is a set of customer and industry expectations that fuels an intense and relentless rivalry in which 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."
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-15-does-icles-competition-for-the-market-node-by.md, 2026-07-25"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-15-does-icles-competition-for-the-market-node-by.md"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
date_created: "2026-07-25T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["semiconductors","red-queen","van-valen","competition-for-the-market","rocks-law","cross-domain-bridge","metaphor-vs-formalism"]
audits: ["2026-07-26 claude-opus-4-8"]
---


The ICLE white paper "From Moore's Law to Market Rivalry" (Albrecht, Manne,
Teece, Zúñiga; [[entity-international-center-for-law-and-economics|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 [[entity-leigh-van-valen|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]]).