Having browsed some of the dating and seduction related message boards, and then listened to some of the gobbledygook taught to students of the Seduction panjandrums, one idea we find absolutely hilarious is that of being the ‘Alpha Male’.

Being the alpha male seems to be the universal excuse of immature guys that are frustrated by their lack of success in attempting to find a girlfriend; and so they decide to take their frustrations out on the rest of the world; starting arguments on internet discussion boards and generally making a nuisance of themselves. However, more enlightened folk would call this being a Cockblock or a Bully etc.

Most of the population will no doubt have seen big and aggressive animals, outfitted with dangerous weapons (fangs, tusks, antlers, horns) such as Gorillas, Elk, Wolves or even Sea lions battling with one another for control of a harem of females on some nature programme or other. And this is most likely where these poor deluded individuals have obtained the idea from. This much was pointed out to one gentleman recently, and he was surprised that it wasn’t an idea developed by his chosen Seduction guru, and had merely been taken out of context from popular science.

Origins

The phrase alpha male originates from back in the 1950’s when Primatologists were first studying animal dominance hierarchies; the animals would be labelled Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta etc., as the perceived order of the level of dominance.

Now, in species such as Gorillas, harems are established, in which the dominant ‘silverback’ male mates with perhaps three to six females. (Male gorillas are two to three times larger than their mates, apparently because competition among males to be successful harem-keepers has conveyed an evolutionary advantage to those that are larger, stronger, and generally more effective in keeping rivals at bay.) No wonder the guys claiming to be the Alpha male have so much pent up anger and aggression, or at least they pretend to be that way.

If we contrast the Gorilla with the Gibbon: gibbons live in male-female pairs, so most healthy gibbons get to reproduce, and usually most males do. As a result, there are very few big winners or big losers and, accordingly, almost no size difference between the sexes.

This is much more like human society, where a far more complex and multi-layered dominance hierarchy will be found. Consider the Military, the Caste system in India, or the company where you work. All of these are multi-level hierarchies. Even if we expand this idea to more violent organisations, The Mafia, the Yakuza and Triads are all multi-layered dominance hierarchies, and it would be facile to claim that the Godfather, Oyabun or Mountain Master gets all the females, whilst the rest of the organisation remains celibate.

Just for fun

So, if we attempt to identify any alpha male in human society, we are forced to confront the fact that there are a number of very powerful people at the top of different divisions of society, and that in turn automatically rules out there being any alpha male in human society.

As a simple test, we have split all of the United Kingdom society into four branches, and identified four possible alpha males. See how much sense this makes to you, and whether any of these people are renowned as harem-keepers:

All of these candidate alpha males appear to be devoted (to the best of my knowledge) to the women they married, and aside from Roman Abramovich getting divorced for a younger woman, none of these people have been know for their sexual exploits. But even then, that doesn’t come close to the sexual proclivities of the gorilla.

Testicle size

So, getting back to more serious science; scientists have observed that species in which mate-guarding predominates generally have small testes. Whereas when frequent copulation is the preferred strategy, then, unsurprisingly, the resulting male gonads are much larger.

For some notable cases of frequent copulation, look as those species that are polyandrous, in which one female regularly mates with more than one male (such as the Jacanas). These animals typically have a high copulation frequency, probably initiated by males, each attempting to swamp the sperm of his rivals and thereby increase the chances that the eggs to be deposited in his nest (and which he will then incubate and care for) are genetically his. The males of such species have oversized testes, producing more sperm than monogamous males whose responsibility is just to inseminate their mate but not to compete with the sperm of other males. This pattern is not limited to birds, it has been found in mammals generally, confirmed by comparing, for example, rodent species that do and do not have many extra-pair copulations, as well as members of the Horse family (including Zebras), Baleen whales and Primates.

Lekking

Some bird species, including Prairie chickens and Sage grouse in North America, breed on what is called a ‘lek,’ a communal displaying ground. Males gather here and show their wares, calling and posturing and typically arranging themselves in a dominance pattern, with the alpha males in the middle. Females mate almost exclusively with these favoured individuals, who may copulate with numerous females in one day; these females, in turn, generally give the subordinate males a cold shoulder. Systems of this sort provide the opportunity to answer this question: When males have especially large testes, is it because of sperm competition? (i.e. because other males are likely to be copulating with the same females) or simply because of the demands of producing enough sperm to fertilize the eggs of so many different females?

The answer is pretty clear-cut: Whereas polyandrous species have large testes, the males of lekking species have testes that, corrected for overall body size, are if anything exceptionally small. Evidently, it is rather easy to make enough sperm to fertilize one female or even many, as dominant lekking males do. What really makes for big balls is when males must compete with the sperm produced by other males.

The most impressive case comes from observations of the great apes. Remember the impressive silverback male gorillas, large in body and relatively aggressive in temperament, who succeed in dominating other males and gaining reproductive rights to a small harem of females? Although their bodies are large, their testicles are remarkably small, indeed downright tiny once corrected for body weight. By contrast, chimpanzee males (which do not achieve anything like the reproductive despotism enjoyed by their gorilla counterparts) have immense testicles. This is entirely reasonable, since a female chimp in heat will copulate with many different males; in one case, Jane Goodall observed a female chimpanzee copulate 84 times in eight days, with seven different males. As a result, a male chimp cannot simply assume that sexual access to an oestrous female will result in paternity. He must produce enough sperm to give them (and thus himself) a fighting chance.

Amongst people, when it comes to testicle size, human males fall somewhere between the polygynous gorilla and the promiscuous chimp, suggesting that we are mildly polygynous.

Infanticide

A more ethically troubling discovery (originally from the work of Sarah Hrdy) has been that many alpha males practise infanticide. The pattern is as follows: When the harem-keeping male is eventually deposed, the newly ascendant alpha male not uncommonly embarks on a gristly policy of slaughtering the nursing infants. Although contemptible by human standards, such behaviour makes ‘good’ evolutionary sense, because after their youngsters are killed, nursing mothers quickly resume ovulating, whereupon they are likely to mate with the new harem-keeper (despite the fact that he murdered her offspring.) Insofar as the unfortunate infants were sired by the preceding male, their fate is of no biological concern to the newly ascendant infanticidal alpha male. He is interested only in his own progeny, not someone else’s.

Interestingly, female Langur monkeys have even evolved an interesting counterstrategy. If a female Langur is in the late stages of pregnancy when the male takeover occurs (roughly every 27 months), she may undergo a ‘pseudo-oestrus,’ developing swollen genitals and a sexual appetite for the new harem-keeper. Then, when her offspring is born, the adult male is more likely to act paternal than infanticidal.

Polyandry

Sometimes, however, males may have little choice: Females mate with more than one male and cannot be prevented from doing so. In one particular species of zebra (known as Grevy’s zebra, after its discoverer) individuals live in groups whose membership is constantly shifting. Females associated with a given male are likely to mate with a different male not long afterwards (polyandrous.) In fact, during a single day they may mate with an average of four different males. On the other hand, there are some Grevy’s females (generally, those that have just given birth) who remain with one male for a prolonged period, during which they are essentially monogamous. They do this, because they need reliable sources of water, which are found only on a male’s territory. So Grevy’s stallions have two different kinds of females to deal with; those that are sexually faithful and those that aren’t (bear in mind that the same female will occupy different roles at different times in her life).

Grevy stallions adjust their tactics accordingly, depending on whether their female companion is polyandrous or monogamous. When mating with polyandrous females, males invest more time and energy in mating itself; Stallions call to and copulate seven times more frequently than when involved (temporarily) with monogamous females. They even ejaculate larger quantities of semen. It is also worth noting that in another zebra species, the Plains zebra, females live in traditional harems, each lead by a single male, and as far as is known, they only mate with the harem-keeper. Plains zebra stallions copulate less, produce less semen, and also have smaller testes than their Grevy’s counterparts, which have to be prepared to deal with females having a penchant for a high-frequency of extra-pair copulations.

Summary

So, the closest human parallel we have to anything like an alpha male would be the charismatic men who establish cults or other forms of communal living arrangements and then proceed to monopolise the sexual attentions of women, including those associated with other, more junior cult members. Indeed, one of the main reasons for the failure of various utopian communes has been eventual resistance to the sexual privileges typically demanded (and received) by the founding fathers.

You might also enjoy reading:-

• Secret sex strategies
• Alpha Male jokes
• Chimps trade meat for mating
• Robin Baker and the early history of Sperm Wars
• Sperm competition and the Kamikaze Sperm Hypothesis

Posted by Jonathan in Anthropology, Sociobiology

1 Comment »