Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

“Playing chicken” is an American male adolescent game of 1950s vintage in which each threatens the other to see who will flinch first. The most familiar example involves automobiles speeding directly toward one another; he who swerves first may gain his life (and, incidentally, save that of his rival) but lose his status. Calling it “playing chicken” recognizes its deep evolutionary origins. Being chicken, in the same youth culture, means being fearful of performing a risky or heroic action. Again, the behavior of subordinates in the barnyard dominance hierarchy is evoked; again, the choice of words betrays if not real knowledge at least a suspicion of the animal roots of the practice.

Another way in which our awareness of animal dominance hierarchies has insinuated itself into the language and proves useful in describing our own behavior is the use of the phrases “top dog” for the alpha male and “underdog” for everyone else. When we say we’re for the underdog in sports or politics or economics, we’re revealing an awareness of dominance hierarchies, their injustice and their shifting fortunes.

There are monarchical social systems in which everyone is dominated by the alpha male or the few highest-ranking males, and hardly any aggression occurs in the rest of the group. The dominant male spends a considerable amount of his time calming outraged subordinates and adjudicating disputes. Sometimes justice is a little rough, but often merely a bark or grimace will suffice. In such systems especially, dominance hierarchies carry with them social stability. The males of many species have evolved potent weaponry. Life would be a lot more dangerous if every time two piranha males, or two lions, or two stags, or two elephant bulls had a difference of opinion, it was a fight to the death. The dominance hierarchy—with relative status fixed for considerable periods of time, and the institutionalization of ritualized rather than real combat in settling serious disputes—is a key survival mechanism. Not only is there a genetic advantage for the dominant male, but also for everyone else. Pax dominatoris

. Even if you have to take a lot of abuse, even if you sometimes resent the brass, it’s safe, maybe even comfortable, in such a system—where everyone knows his place.

So what kind of selection is this? Is it simple individual selection for the alpha male, with the benefit for other males being only incidental? Is it kin selection, because the lower-ranking males are not-too-distant relatives of the alpha? Is it group selection, because such a group, structured and stabilized by a dominance hierarchy, is more likely to survive than one in which combat to the death is the norm? Are these categories separable and distinct?

The alpha might be of a mind to attack an offending inferior, but if the latter makes the species’ characteristic submission gestures, the former feels obliged to spare him. They have not sat down and agreed on a moral code, no tablets have been carried down from the mountain, but the postural and gestural inhibitions to violence work very much like a moral code.

One of the most spectacular examples of dominance behavior in groups—known among animals as different as birds, antelopes, and (perhaps) midges—is called the lek:[L]eks are tournaments, held before and during the breeding season, day after day, when the same group of males meet at a traditional place and take up the same individual positions on an arena, each occupying and defending a small territory or court. Intermittently or continuously they spar with their neighbours one at a time, or display magnificent plumage, or vocal powers, or bizarre gymnastics … Though they have territories, yet they have a hierarchy with the top-ranking males typically placed in the middle and ungraded lesser aspirants ranged outside. Females come to these arenas in due course to be fertilized, and normally they make their way through to one or other of the dominants in the centre.¹⁴

Perhaps spring break at Ft. Lauderdale or Daytona Beach is one of the more conspicuously lekish human institutions.