Leigh Van Valen

Evolutionary biologist (1935–2010) who proposed the Red Queen hypothesis in his 1973 paper "A New Evolutionary Law" (Evolutionary Theory 1:1–30), naming the "Law of Extinction": the observation that a taxon's probability of extinction is roughly constant over time, independent of how long it has already survived. He is the biology-side anchor of the vault's cross-domain tracking of the Red Queen as a donor metaphor — the specific, quantitative (constant, age-independent hazard) claim against which looser "run to stay in place" borrowings are measured. His 1973 primary has not yet been read in the vault; the constant-extinction-probability attribution currently rests on a Tier 4 definitional source pending that read.

References

• claim-red-queen-hypothesis-names-running-to-stay-in-place · claim-barnett-applied-red-queen-to-organizational-competition

• claim-icle-invokes-red-queen-as-carroll-metaphor-not-van-valen-formalism · claim-icle-grounds-competition-for-the-market-in-industrial-organization-economics · observation-no-formal-test-maps-semiconductor-node-races-onto-van-valens-constant-hazard

• Question: question-does-competition-for-the-market-map-onto-red-queen-extinction-probability

• 2026-09-26: the semiconductor leg is now read as one instance of a broader cross-domain pattern — the ICLE white paper reached for the Red Queen's name while bypassing both Van Valen and the industry-adjacent Barnett descendant, the mirror of an identical name-vs-descendant gap on the Bartlett/model-collapse side (observation-bartlett-collapse-and-vanvalen-semiconductor-absence-notes-are-a-confirmed-three-layer-bridge)