Sometimes the "nice guys" win

9 minutes
worth it

if you absolutely HAVE TO HAVE a short cut, skip ahead to about the four minute mark, when the vid starts talking about tuberculosis (but its worth it to watch the whole thing!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4UMyTnlaMY

thank you Obi for posting this

Fascinating! Thanks for posting!

Very interesting. Unfortunately it took the eradication of every alpha male in that troop. They said Baboons have large brains that allow those societies. I wonder if humans with even larger brains would have the same transformation considering how much more complex our society is than a baboons.

It also makes you wonder what would happen if another troop decided to take over their territory or steal their females. How would that troop fair if they were attacked? They mentioned just the Alpha males so it makes you wonder about things like Alpha females as well in our society.

Interesting Video though that brings up some interesting questions!

I'm reading that dominance hierarchies are hugely central to how we process our social landscape, even for us humans still!! It seems to easily tie into how we perceive our self worth, probably because we automatically compare and contrast self with other types of self, to assess progressive and invent some artificial subjective measure of worth which we use to beat ourselves down with
:blink:

... as we seemingly inherit the same neurological foundations as other complex life, but of course we seem to have the extra capacity to conceptualize around and avoid or indulge the base instinctual drivers. And as a result we can avoid the 'dark' side of domination, intimidation and enslavement to have unnatural concepts like equality, improved health and as mentioned in the video, a way to reduce depression in social groups.

As mentioned in the vid, I've heard biologically the action of depression looks a lot like what happens when someone is defeated in that social hierarchy of dominance standing.

I've also been reading lately that some animal female sexual preference is quite dependent on where the female is within her menstrual cycle, as the different mix of hormones create allure to different types of mating partners. When fertile they might be attracted to one type (eg risk taking physically stronger), and the rest of the time other types (eg stable less large). Perhaps explaining why in some parts of the world many progeny are not descendants of the person who things they are a father.

Further, I've even read that some species quite literally harvest wanted chemicals from the males reproductive system by choosing mates to benefit from!

A male's seminal fluid can influence the size of a female's future offspring even when he's not the father, a study of neriid flies has found. In response, females may have evolved to seek out and benefit from these seminal resources when they're not fertile.

She observed that when a large male neriid fly (Telostylinus angusticollis) mated with a female before she was fertile he would pass along his seminal fluid, while her eggs remained unfertilised. But when the female mated with a second, smaller male two weeks later and laid eggs fertilised with his sperm, Dr Crean was stunned to find the offspring were closer in size to the first male.

"An abundance of recent research has shown that ejaculate, even in the tiny quantities exchanged by flies, contains more than just genetic material," she explained, adding that seminal fluid contains proteins, peptides and non-coding genetic material.

"It's well known that chemicals in the ejaculate can influence a female's behaviour.

"In Drosophila [fruit flies], for example, sex peptides transferred in seminal fluids have a range of effects, from getting females to lay more eggs and change her feeding behaviour to stopping her from wanting to mate with other males and making her more aggressive. In this case we found that the seminal fluid has an impact on future offspring as well: previous mating partners were able to influence the size of subsequent offspring, even when they didn't sire them."

Source

So when aggressive behaviour doesn't control mating decisions, its interesting to see what constitutes 'alpha'.... it might mean what ever is healthier! Then again, it depends on the environment because sometimes the physically aggressive types might be the only type to achieve survival in conflict prone cultures. Luckily for us technology can mitigate that requirement, but not without its own downsides. I guess ideally we wouldn't have the conflict - problem solved.