Do Arctic Hares Play Parrondo’s Games?

We remark on Nelson and Masel’s (2017, 2018) papers [Intercellular competition and the inevitability of multicellular aging, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 114 (2017) 12982–12987; Reply to Cheong et al.: Unicellular survival precludes Parrondo’s paradox, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 115 (2018) E5260, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1806709115 ], addressing the connection between the published work and the game-theoretic Parrondo’s paradox. The Parrondo’s paradox refers to the phenomenon of achieving winning outcomes by playing two losing games in a random or deterministic order, and is intimately related to flashing Brownian ratchets with applications in physics, engineering and biology. In this paper, we raise important considerations and intricacies pertaining to the paradox, for the benefit of future Parrondo-related research.