https://www.mawer.com/the-art-of-boring/blog/the-myth-of-the-alpha-wolf
The myth of the alpha wolf
November 24, 2015
|
Kara Lilly
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The Inefficient Marketplace of Ideas
Let’s play a thought experiment: what do you know about wolves?
Now ask yourself: how do you
know this?
These
were the questions running through my mind as I listened to David Mech,
one of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject of wolves and
the founder of the International Wolf Center. Mech has spent over 40
years studying wolves, even spending several summers in the Artic
observing their behaviour in the wild. He has also written 11 books on
the species.
I called Mech because I wanted to know why the term
“alpha wolf” still exists in mainstream consciousness when scientists
have falsified the idea long ago. I figured that what I would learn
might help me to better understand why the marketplace of ideas can
sometimes be so inefficient. So for about thirty minutes, Mech and I
chatted about wolves.
The story of the term “alpha wolf” is
fascinating and one in which Mech was an important player. In 1968, Mech
finished the manuscript for what would become his best-selling book,
The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species.
In it, he references the work of Rudolph Shenkel, a biologist who
studied the behaviour of wolves in a German zoo in 1944. It was Shenkel
who first coined the term “alpha wolf” in reference to his observation
that male and female wolves seemed to compete to become dominant within
their group. Mech then included the term in his book.
The trouble
with Shenkel’s work was that wolves behave very differently in the wild
than in zoos. When you take a group of human strangers and put them
together, alpha men and women tend to emerge. According to Mech this
also happens with other animals, including wolves. But wolf packs don’t
form in the wild the way that they do in captivity; instead of strangers
being thrust together, wolves form around family units. The “alpha
male” in a pack is usually just the “dad,” the “alpha female” just the
“mom”, and the rest of the pack follows their lead, not because of some
competitive vying for dominance, but because it’s mom and dad.
Mech
came to this realization when studying wolves in their natural habitat
in the Arctic. When it became obvious that using the term “alpha wolf”
in his first book had been misleading, he began to publish articles
correcting the misinformation. It took him over a decade, but
eventually, the references of “alpha” behaviour among wolves in
scientific literature fell precipitously. Unfortunately, Mech has been
unable to dislodge the term from mainstream consciousness (to his
frustration)....
