The Alpha Male Myth

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Okay, today we're gonna be talking about a story we have been working on for what feels like a dog's age or maybe we should say wolf's age amory? Hmm, yes, maybe we should because the story begins with wolves. Specifically a book about wolves called The Wolf.

The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species. You could even say it's the book about wolves. You could say that because the wolf, which is by biologist David Meat, Might just be the most consequential book on wolves ever written, but not for the reasons you might think. When it was published in 1970, the wolf was the most complete collection of scientific knowledge about wolves you could buy.

But today it is also credited with unleashing a certain idea into our popular lexicon. How would I describe myself? Three words. Hardworking, alpha male. Jackhammer. In the information aid, Sheldon, you and I are the alpha males. One of these men will be the alpha male after tonight. Who's the alpha? You're looking at him, kid. Today, when talking about human beings, we know that alpha male usually means the guy at the top of the food chain.

In theory, he's confident, competitive, capable, and successful with the ladies. In the manosphere, alpha status is an aspirational goal. Otherwise, you're being a beta who's weak, unattractive, submissive. And lacks the traits of real manhood. Well, I think an alpha male is a man that other men want to be. Um, and I think a beta male is that other is a man other men are not trying to emulate in any degree, right?

That was Andrew Tate on the Dean Show in 2022 before he was charged with human trafficking, among other alleged crimes. For others, the alpha male is an emblem of toxic masculinity that has seeped into our lives far beyond the internet. Notably into our political discourse. Like in 2024, when Elon Musk re-posted a theory on X saying only alphas are capable of making good decisions and should be the only people to participate in democracy.

Also, President Donald Trump has frequently been described as an alpha by his supporters. So you might be wondering, what does all of this have to do with a book about wolves published in the 70s? Well, in Dave Meach's book, he uses the term alpha to describe the animal at the top of Wolf's social hierarchies. There's a theory that this is what popularized the idea of the alpha male as we know it. Except here's the thing, Dave got it wrong.

Why am I calling this thing the alpha male? I'm Ben High Value Alpha Johnson. I'm Amory Wolf Sieverson. Today on Endless Thread, the Alpha Male Myth.

To get to the bottom of this whole alpha male mix-up, we had to go back to the source. When did your wolf love affair begin, Dave? Well, I began working with wolves in nineteen fifty-eight. So we tracked down Dave Meach, the author of the book that started it all. These days, Dave is a senior research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey out of the University of Minnesota in St. Paul.

But decades ago, he was a young PhD candidate, observing wolf populations by airplane over Isle Royale in Lake Superior. I can't help but remember the first time I saw the wolves from the aircraft and saw this large pack of fifteen out on the ice. just seeing those for the first time from the aircraft.

was really quite a moment, but I had no idea um which which members were the young ones, which were the old ones, which were the dominant ones. I couldn't even tell one from the other from the era, so it might just well be answered. tracking around there. Very little was known about wolves at the time. Um, I was there to learn anything I could about them actually.

The first thing that Dave will tell you about wolves is that they are incredibly shy creatures. They're so scared of humans, it can be almost impossible to get close enough to study them in the wild. And in the 1960s, scientists were only just starting to use technology like radio callers to track wildlife. Hence the aircraft. So at that time, a lot of what scientists knew about wolf behavior came from studying them up close in captivity.

When Dave was starting out, one of the most comprehensive studies on wolf behavior available was a paper published in the nineteen forties by a Swiss researcher named Rudolf Schenkel. Schenkel was a an animal behaviorist. Science knew at the time that wolves lived in packs, but we had no idea what a pack was other than a group of wolves.

So he thought he'd like to study wolves in a pack. And so he needed a lot of wolves to do that. So he just went and and um uh recruited wolves from various zoos. And um put them all together in a colony and uh figured that was a wolf pack. Then Schenkel waited and watched and documented what happened next. Probably you know of and most people have heard of the pecking order in chickens. Oh yeah. It turns out that uh many animals

if you put a bunch of random individuals of the same species together uh in captivity, they do tend to form a pecking order or or a dominance hierarchy. And that's what these wolves did. There were two hierarchies, one for the males and one for the females. That's just the way the wolves in that group happened to sort themselves out.

And that's what Schenkel described. Schenkel's wolves fought it out to establish their pecking order. In the end, the pack was led by a male and female wolf, both of which fought their way to that position. And they were called the alphas.

Fast forward now to the 1960s. Dave has been studying wolves for about a decade, and he's getting ready to publish his epic book. And as he's compiling his research, he includes Schenkel's findings and the concept of the Alpha. Well, I didn't know any better. I put the first radio collar out in nineteen sixty eight and I was getting a little better idea at that time. of what a wolf pack was, but that's just about the time I was finishing up writing the book.

So When I put the information from Schenkel into the book, I really didn't know much more about the wolf social hierarchy than he did. Dave's book, The Wolf, comes out and it becomes a bestseller. He goes on with his life and his career studying wolves in the wild. And he hears about a place where you could live right next to wolves and study them up close. I spent twenty-four summers uh on Ellesmere Island and near up near the North Pole where wolves are tame.

What Dave means by tame is that on Ellesmere Island, wolves have had very little contact with humans, so they never learned to be afraid of us. When Dave and his fellow researchers came by to observe them, the wolves figured that these hairless apes who kept their distance, watched and took notes were pretty chill.

If a little weird maybe. And it was during one of those summers roughly around the late nineteen nineties that it started dawning on me that um what what Schenkel had found was not really uh validly applicable to what I was seeing in the wild. So Dave, what is the truth about wolves in terms of a power structure? Well, their their social structure is is very much like a human family. A wolf pack, we found out. is a family, that is a pair of wolves and their offspring.

So the way it forms is a maturing male from one pack and a maturing female from another pack leave those packs and go off and strike their on their own, try to find a mate. and a place where there's no other wolves, and settle down, um, they pair bond, uh, produce pups and start their own pack, just like a human family does. In fact, anthropologists consider the wolfpack a better analog for a human family than than our most primate.

In my notes I had been writing the alpha male did this, the alpha male did that. And I thought, wait a minute. Why am I calling this thing the alpha male? You call an animal an alpha if it fights to get to the top. And this animal didn't have to do that. So that's when I decided, oh I better correct this. This is a super nice chill scientist's way of describing a kind of gob smacking or at least forehead slapping problem.

The concept of the alpha male that Schenkel had observed almost fifty years ago at this point, and that Dave had used in his best selling book, was incorrect. In 1999, Dave published a paper called Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolfpacks, which was supposed to act as a correction to his book. In it, he discusses the revelation that wolf packs in the wild are not.

hierarchical in some intense way. They're just family units. Schenkel wasn't totally wrong about what he was seeing in his own study. The wolves in his captive wolf pack did fight amongst themselves for dominance. But those animals weren't a family. They were a bunch of random wolves from different zoos that had to figure out how to live with one another. And so they weren't representative of a natural pack.

led by a mom and pop wolf in the wild. But by then, Dave's original book had been in print for almost three decades, and it's not so easy to take back an idea. The concept of the alpha male as a default biological fact of animal behavior, including in humans. had taken on a life of its own. But the only way you're gonna be able to truly reach your potential is if you conquer your inner alpha. What will happen is women will naturally allow him to take the lead.

They would naturally submit to him. When you're an alpha male and you're against other alpha males, and we eat our own. Alpha males eat their own. Do you think your book popularized the term? You know, I g I have to do a lot of interviews uh about this subject and someone had um put together a uh graph of some sort showing that Starting around the early seventies. that the term started becoming more in common parlance. And um

seems to be a correlation between when the book my book was published and and an increase in the use of the term. But as you know, correlation is not necessarily causation, so we can't really say whether that book had anything to do with it or not. That's a classic scientist's answer right there, Dave. Dave asked his publishers to stop printing new copies to avoid the spread of misinformation. But no debt.

Why wouldn't the publisher stop? Oh, the book was selling so well. It would take years for anything to be done at the time. But we'll come back to that. At this point, we can clearly establish that there is no such thing as an alpha male when it comes to wolves living naturally in the wild. But does that make it wrong to use this term for humans? We asked Dave what he thought. Of course, Dave's a wolf guy. He doesn't claim expertise beyond that.

However, there's no question there are dominance hierarchies, right? Not just in humans, but in many other species. So uh there is a biological basis for it. In chickens, if nothing else. What do we consider of forcing oneself to the top. Uh it does it always have to be a physical fight.

And I think what's been happening in society is that we've seen a lot of cases where some prominent people have asserted themselves uh m more vigorously than others and have by doing that uh actually have gotten to the top. and whether it's valid to call them alphas is is not up to me. But I could see where some folks might want to do that. And I wouldn't refute it. Dave told us if we wanted to learn more about alpha male behavior in people, we could try reaching out to a primatologist.

After the break, we trace the origins of human alpha males down our evolutionary family tree. A familiar place for the next topic. Less of a o and more of a ha. Ha ha ha! Well, the holidays have come and gone once again, but if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift, well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half-off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea: you get it now. We call it an early present for next year.

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Wherever you get your podcasts. We don't use the term alpha male as much in gorilla society. Um, we tend to use the term dominant male more often, although you will see alpha silver back um in on occasion. And in chimps I think alpha male is used a lot more frequently. Doctor Terra Stoinski has possibly the coolest job. She's the CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of the Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund in Atlanta, Georgia, but she spends a lot of her time with gorillas in Rwanda.

I am trained as a primatologist and have been studying gorillas now for about thirty years. And my particular interest has traditionally been in male gorilla social dynamics and reproductive strat strategies. So, you know, male gorillas are the largest primate on the planet, weighing in at 400 pounds. They possess this incredible size and strength, but also this very gentle nature as well.

Gorillas are one of the five species that help make up the great apes, our closest living relatives on planet Earth. The great apes include orangutans, Gorillas. Chimps. And bonobos. They also include What's up, bro? You and me, baby. Humans. Chimps and gorillas share around ninety-eight percent of our DNA. All the apes are highly intelligent. Chimps are known to be great tool users, they use a lot of political maneuvering in their social structure.

Gorillas are so strong and have such a unique sort of ecological niche that they aren't great tool users, at least not in the wild. In captivity they can use tools quite quite well. Um, but as a result of that, there's kind of this joke that gorillas aren't as smart as chimps, but we we know that really not to be the case. They just show their intelligence in different ways. Spoken like a true gorilla researcher. Exactly.

While we might not always call them the Alpha, chimp and gorilla societies do tend to be led by a dominant male. Their dominance-based social hierarchy is much closer to the model that the animal behaviorist Rudolf Schenkel observed in his Captive Wolf Pack. But turns out that the traits of an alpha male ape aren't as clear cut as the ultra manly alpha male we know in popular culture. There is a dominant side to it of being a leader.

um of physical size or maybe aggression sometimes. But size and aggression aren't everything. I think in the animal world it's a lot more about social connectivity, it's about politics. It's about not just relying on your strength, but also relying on uh your social skills and being a statesman in in a lot of ways, both in chimp and gorilla society. Which primate species Do you think is most similar to the other? Ha ha ha.

I will say one of the things I find funny is sometimes when we're talking about gorillas, you know, I've had people say to me, wait, can we stop for a second? Are we talking about gorillas right now or are we talking about people? But in general, I think chimps are a good representation of the more aggressive side of of human nature. Chimps are very territorial and will actually go to war with neighboring families of chimpanzees. Whereas gorillas stay in touch with other families.

They even have family reunions sometimes when all the gorilla cousins can play together again. Hmm. We do see, you know, these kind of multi-level societies where these gorilla families that will split can come back together. Um and unlike chimps where that might be really aggressive, here they can come back together. Kids can play, individuals can interact. We see these relationships, they can be maintained over a decade or more.

So I think elements of the more peaceful side of human nature, you know, we're learning more that that's reflected in in gorillas. On this day, the year of our Lord, that we are talking to you, what is you know, what what resonates the most with you? in terms of the comparison to humans.

In in this moment in time, I think chimps, unfortunately. I I'm seeing less of our gorilla side at this moment in time, you know, both in our own country and worldwide. But so right now I think the chimp side of us is winning a little bit. You know, not as much collaboration, not as much coming together, maybe a little bit more separation, um, and focusing on differences rather than similarity. Yeah. This is kind of a fun game to play with oneself. Like am I

having a gorilla day or a chimp day or a bonobo day. That's great. I haven't thought about that. I'm gonna do that in the morning now. When I wake up, I'll say this I wanna have a gorilla day and then I'll assess at the end of the day what I actually was successful in doing. There you go. There you

But despite everything we have in common with our great ape relatives, there is one really big difference between us and them. Which is that over the course of millennia of human history, we've come to organize our societies in a very different way. And it's a lot more complicated than just simple biology. How do you define masculinity? I don't. I don't. This is Matthew Gutman. He's a cultural anthropologist and professor emeritus at Brown University.

He has spent his career studying what it means to be a man in cultures across the globe. Go out and interview ten people. You're gonna get ten different definitions of what masculinity means for them. That's what is of interest to me. Matthew points out that when it comes to attributing certain behaviors to our biological sex, We seem more willing to explain away the behaviors of men. What do you expect? He's a guy. Of course he's gonna do that. We don't say of course she's a woman.

Obviously people do say that, but it's much more criticized, and rightly so. I think we need to criticize it more when we make these sweeping generalizations about guys. This is saying there are things that they cannot control. And so I would argue There has been more criticism, fortunately. um of attributing na things naturally to to women's bodies. But I think we still continue to do it a lot with guys' bodies.

Matthew argues that as a species, we have a vast repertoire of behaviors that allow us to coexist in societies. We make decisions about how to treat one another based on laws and morals that we came up with ourselves, not just biological or instinctual urges that we can't help but succumb to. This is something that ultimately sets us apart from our animal kingdom family members.

Let's go back to Dave, the wolf researcher who was trying to get his publisher to stop making copies of his book and fix his alpha male legacy. I couldn't even get it stop the publishers to stop publishing it until two years ago. So that was that book was in print for fifty two years.

So where does this leave us with the whole alpha male concept? As it does or doesn't pertain to humans. This reminds me a bit of a meme that started this whole thing and led to the pitch from our producer on this episode, Franny Monahan. And without describing it in great detail, I'll just say there's really a group of memes that now feature a photo of Dave Meach, a very normal looking mustachioed guy in a parka who does science.

And this group of memes really serves to remind the extremely online that there's this guy who studied wolves once and referenced this idea of the alpha, and that may be the origin of this kind of mess that we are in. when it comes to ideas about masculinity and power and leadership. Humans are animals formed by millennia of nature, right? And we're also, at least in our minds, special and different from the animal world. So reducing things to simplistic structures like the alpha or top dog.

is a pretty simplistic non-scientific concept. um and way of thinking of things. And I think there's a way to both recognize things that seem within our nature and also recognize those things in our nature are absolutely changeable and society doesn't coalesce around our instincts, like society and civilization and the way that we interact with each other is really what we make of it. Yeah, I mean, biologically

I just wanna kind of be like taking a little nap in a tree and instead um working this job. So what's up with that? You know what I mean? And also just that we associate the term alpha with being the leader when in reality there are so many different ways to kind of like lead a group and guide a group and be a positive Influence and you know, member of that group.

I've worked with all different kinds of leaders and you know, alphas are great, but like they're not always the best kind of leaders, right? Give me a beta with a good sense of humor any day. Yeah, right? Come on. Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Franny Monahan, was co hosted by me, Amory C. And oh Ben Brock Johnson, mix and sound design by

Manager Paul Vikas. The rest of our team is Grace Tatter, Dean Russell, Emily Jenkasky, and our managing producer, Samata Joshi. Endless Thread is a show about the clear lines between wolves in captivity and wild ones. If you have an untold history, Story from the internet you want us to tell, you can hit us up, endless thread at the end. You are dot org.