I’m bound to refer to it sooner or later so I might as well post it now. Matthew Yglesias says the scientist who proposed the original alpha-male thing about wolves says get over it.

Cliché about “alpha males” and so forth are so deeply ingrained in our culture that I had no idea what they specifically referred to. Apparently, though, it refers to research on hierarchical behavior in wolf packs, research that was done in the 1960s and popularized in part through David Mech’s book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species.

And in this fascinating video (via Jim Henley) Mech explains why that research is outdated and people should drop the idea:

I nicked the whole post from here.

An old English professor said, with a semi-straight face, that the Royal Society was founded in part by poets who were looking for new metaphors in the workings of the world. And as metaphors attributable to science research goes alpha males have been extremely popular for, ironically, men who imagine themselves to be not alpha males themselves but beta males!

What’s odd, of course, is that most actual women aren’t that drawn to actual “alpha males” — the Arnold Schwarzenegger type, for instance, who really might become “leaders of the pack” if civilization broke down far enough to resemble the (improbable) “state of nature” imagined by romantics who imagine themselves to be daring social scientists.