One must run as fast as they can just to stay in place in Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking-Glass. As far as oddities within the Alice in Wonderland world go, treadmill physics is pretty tame. But what if this principle existed beyond magical fiction? What if you had to run as fast as possible in order to stay alive on the actual Earth? When evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen put forward the Red Queen’s hypothesis—the idea that species must constantly adapt to avoid extinction—few understood where this rabbit hole would lead.
Coevolution is the process by which two or more species impact each other’s evolution via natural selection. Sometimes it’s symbiotic—like bees pollinating flowers and receiving food in return—or parasitic, like fleas. But more often than not, coevolution entails an ancient and ever-accelerating arms race. The faster fox catches the rabbit and reproduces, so foxes become faster. The quicker rabbit survives and reproduces, so rabbits become quicker. The result, after many generations, are faster foxes and quicker rabbits, but the hunt remains unchanged.
Look around and the fingerprints of these arms races are everywhere. Nature’s supreme design is precisely the result of this species-wide, eons-long sprint. But non-human life struggles to tango to the new tempo we’ve set. Our careless dominance over the Earth has rewritten the rules of the race. In the anthropocene, the rabbit doesn’t just have to evolve to outrun the fox. It must also keep up with us.
Look no further than your eyesight right now for evidence of human’s impact on the genes of other species. The domesticated animal at your feet, the sugar in your coffee, the bacteria in your gut—all coevolved with Homo sapiens. But these are inoffensive examples. Consider, instead, that elephants born without tusks are more likely to escape death by poaching, so that a far higher proportion of subsequent generations are now tuskless. Or Ideonella sakaiensis, a bacteria that produces enzymes to eat that ever-growing human byproduct called plastic. We wield godlike power. It’s no wonder so many of us mistakenly believe that we’ve exited the race entirely.
The effect of coevolution over generations is subtle—nature follows a meandering path to no location in particular. Us humans, on the other hand, are in a hurry. If evolution is thought of as a blind watchmaker, then we’re a bulldozer with a stopwatch, mowing through wonderland in zealous pursuit after a rabbit we call progress. But in our haste it appears we’ve entirely forgotten just how small we really are. We haven’t yet transcended the genetic web of life despite vast technological improvements. We still depend upon our coevolved relationships. And that means we’re also still locked in arms races that keep us in check.
The bacteria that causes bubonic plague killed half of Europe just a few centuries ago during the Black Death. More recently a single-strand virus killed millions and crippled global order during the Covid pandemic—an event still ongoing. Our hyper-fertilized monocultures bankrupt the soil of nutrients and artificial pesticides only create more resistant pests. Perhaps The Last of Us’s parasitic-fungus-apocalypse and Planet of the Apes’ primate uprising resonate so well with audiences because they feel so cosmically righteous. That after so many years of trampling over other species we finally reach our reckoning at the hands, flagella, or hyphae of another.
Sometime between the Industrial Revolution and the atomic era, the Iglulik storyteller Inugpasugjuk told Greenlandic explorer Knud Rasmussen a story:
Two men came to a hole in the sky.
One asked the other to lift him up…
But so beautiful was it in heaven that
the man who looked in over the edge
forgot everything, forgot his companion
whom he had promised to help up
and simply ran off into all the
splendor of heaven.
It’s hard to view humanity’s relationship to other species as anything but parasitic. Our storied upbringing starting from apes and growing to the dominant force we are today is accredited to their help. And yet we’ve jettisoned our collaborators like a spent rocket fuselage only to reach a lifeless, dark vacuum above. We stand not on the shoulders of giants but on the bent backs of countless species. We’ve clear-cut forests and factory-farmed our way through the hole in the sky to reach—what exactly?
The angst and anxiety we’re collectively feeling might just be buyer’s remorse. That the promise of social media, frivolous gadgets, and next-day shipping came at too steep a price—the health of the biosphere. And while we can’t ask for a refund, maybe we can rewrite the rules of the race once again. Can we transform our parasitic relationship into a mutualistic one, keeping our positive gains like medicine and education while also uplifting our collaborators in the process? Can we slow down, turn around, and extend a hand back to help lift them up?
The rabbit hole doesn’t go very far without any rabbits to lead us. And a hole in the sky may just be an exit from wonderland.
