This Ain't A Scene, It's An Evo-Lutionary Arms Race 

The Cold War Heats Up¹

 It's 1947 in post World War 2 Germany; Russia tightens its grip upon Berlin and blockades its former Allies from East Berlin.² Tension rises between the Russians and allies. America announces the Marshall Plan, offering support to a recovering Europe, starting with reviving the industries of Germany. Stalin responds by extending the reach of his power by creating the Eastern Bloc, a coalition of communist states in Europe that was led by the USSR, to prevent America from buying influence in Europe.³ The Cold War Begins; America is pitted against their former ally, the USSR, in a dash for power. With expanding the missile gaps, a race for space, and a number of heated stand-offs, the arms race of the Cold War was in full effect.⁴  This was one of the biggest stalemates in world history, lasting for years and changing the USSR and America to a completely different countries by its end. Through all but its threats, secrets, and world changing effects, it still pales in comparison to a larger, grander war, one involving virtually every being on the planet. Slowly changing them, evolving them over time into greater adapted animals, yet still keeping them in an evolutionary deadlock with their opponents. I'm talking about the arms race that is co-evolution. 

 Co-evolution? More like Co-re-EVIL-ution? Right?

Huh? Huh? Am I right? Am I right?⁵

 Horrible puns aside, co-evolution, the evolutionary arms race is a deadlock between predator and prey, each one trying to gain an evolutionary advantage over the other. Take the relation between the cheetah and gazelle for example. The cheetah, a predator adapted for stealthy and speed, against it a gazelle would be easy prey, if it were not for the gazelle’s own adaptations. Where cheetahs are designed for encountering prey, gazelles are designed for avoiding dangers.⁶ They are agile, have quick reflexes, and are fast, though not as fast as a cheetah. It seems as though the two are locked in a stalemate, but even with all their adaptations some gazelle fail to escape the feline speedsters, and it is this tip towards the one side of the scale that will stoke the fires of the evolutionary arms race. Over the years, as the weaker gazelles become prey to the cheetahs and the stronger, better adapted members survive, you begin to see a slow change in the population, maybe faster gazelles that can jump higher, run faster and farther, far enough to escape being fancy feast for a ferocious feline. This small advance now puts cheetahs at a disadvantage, and puts the task of developing better adaptations upon them.⁶ Through all this, though, the two continue to reach a constant balance. 

"Crouching Gazelle, Flipping Cheetah"⁷

 The Red Queen and The Race Of Our Lives

The cheetah becomes faster, the gazelle jumps higher. If this continues their adaptations will only grow bigger. In a million years we may have gazelles leaping through trees as if it were a kung-fu movie and cheetahs with claws so big, they can cut a tree down in one swipe. A constant progression, only to reach the same relation as before; there is a hypothesis for this type of co-evolution, appropriately named “The Red Queen Hypothesis.”⁶  “Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place,” says the Red Queen to Alice.⁸ This is seen in many animals of the animal kingdom, such as the cheetah/gazelle relationship, but also between us humans and one of our most influential predators, parasites. Their need to use us as a host is so great that we developed sex in order to try and fend them off, to some success.⁹ But even though we developed new weapons and defenses and combined our DNA to strengthen the next generation against them, they retaliated with their own set of adaptations.^9,10 Better camouflage, new infection methods, hiding themselves from our immune systems all keep these microscopic predators a constant and relevant threat to us. If it were not for our human ingenuity creating medicines to help eliminate them, our position in this evolutionary arms race would put us far from grabbing gold. As it now stands right now, we're barely bronze.

Red Queen¹¹

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1 http://www.designer-daily.com/examples-of-american-cold-war-propaganda-2918^↩
2 Miller, Roger Gene (2000). To Save a City: The Berlin Airlift, 1948–1949. Texas A&M University Press. ISBN 0-89096-967-1^↩
3 http://eastgermany.info/plans.htm^↩
4 http://www.coldwar.org/index.asp^↩
5 http://fozmeadows.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/snappy-snake.png^↩
6 Zuk, M. Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007.^↩
7 icanhasgif.com^↩
8 Carroll, Lewis, and Ralph Steadman. Through the Looking Glass. New York: C. N. Potter; Distributed by Crown, 1973. ^↩
9 Kurtz,Joachim.Sex, parasites and resistance – an evolutionary approach. Zoology. 106, (4) 2003: 327–339.^↩
10 Hillis, Daniel, W. Co-evolving parasites improve simulated evolution as an optimization procedure. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena. 42 (1–3) 1990: 228–234.^↩
11 http://www.visembryo.com/story170.html^↩