Complex evolutionary systems and the Red Queen

Some of the most obvious complex adaptive systems are biological. A key concern in biology is how the overall properties of systems relate to the behaviour of their components. Competition between these components in the form of an arms race, the 'Red Queen effect', helps explain the trend towards more complex organisms. This effect helps explain why these biological systems became and remained complex. It may well also have driven the most distinctive and economically relevant of human biological characteristics - high intelligence. Analogously, competition in the form of the Red Queen effect is a promising avenue of research within economics.