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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.

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