Science Destroys the Myth of Alpha Males (& Alpha Wolves, Too)
- 5 days ago
- 10 min read
One of the most pervasive myths about human society and interpersonal dynamics is the myth of the alpha male. The situation is a bit of a myth inside a myth, or a myth-ception, because it's based on the idea of the alpha wolf, which is also not a real thing. How do I know this? Because the guy who wrote the book where the concept of the alpha wolf came from has spent the rest of his life trying to convince people that alpha wolves do not exist.
Why is this myth so prevalent today, and especially among a certain subset of men? Let's break this story down, and let’s hope we can change some minds or at the very least get some people thinking. If you haven't subscribed to the channel yet, please do, and come with me on a continued journey into real science and fact-finding, where we just learn the actual truth about the world instead of living completely in the dark and sustaining ourselves on random feelings about things and vibes. I'm Kevin Lankes, but my friends call me doodles, and I'm about to definitively show you why you should never ever take anyone seriously if they believe in alpha, beta, or really any sort of Greek alphabet kind of people.
The year is 1970, and after years of studying the wolf population of Isle Royale National Park, David Mech has published the definitive account of the science of wolves. The book is called The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, and it becomes an instant hit. People everywhere read this thing, it’s a bestseller, and it cements our understanding of wolves to this very day. Mech’s observations so long ago, revealed to him in particular a pattern that he believed was a demonstration of hierarchical wolfpack culture overall. He signified what he saw by coining the term alpha wolf. And today, Mech wishes he could take the whole thing back.
Mech has studied wolves now for over sixty-five years. He says we’ve learned more since his book was published than all of the previous knowledge we had about wolves put together. We barely knew anything other than fairy tales and distant observations about them when the book was published, and a lot of the conventional knowledge that came out of the book was itself based on previous foundational research by a man named Rudolph Schenkel.
In the 1930s, Schenkel wanted to study wolves but didn’t have a lot of opportunities to do that in the wild. So he pulled captive wolves together from separate zoos and these wolves weren’t related and had no connection, and he thought that this makeshift pack would be a representation of real conditions, but of course that wasn’t the case. They operated just like human prisoners would in the same kind of experiment. And the fight for dominance that erupted was what Schenkel and Mech would cement into the record as the dynamic of the alpha. Schenkel had identified what he called a “lead wolf,” which became the inspiration for Mech’s alpha wolf. Schenkel also mistakenly believed that wolves had outbursts of pent-up aggression, and they’d have to take that energy out on the weakest members of society. These ideas were not correct, but they were what we had to pull from in the research at the time.
So what’s really going on with wolfpack dynamics? If alpha wolves were identified by pitting unrelated wolves together in captivity, what happens to wolves in the wild that are left to form their own communities? The situation that arises naturally in the wild could not be more different than what Schenkel saw with his captured zoo animal frankenpack.
Starting in 1986, when Mech was in grad school at Purdue, he landed the opportunity to study wolves on Canada’s Ellesmere Island. Ellesmere is an arctic island close to Greenland in Nunavut, Canada. The crazy thing about the wolves there was that they weren’t afraid of people, and Mech was able to get up close and personal. For example, he describes these really cool moments where a wolf cub once helped him untie his shoelace, and times when he got to hang out in the den with the cubs and their designated babysitter while the other adults were out hunting. He was able to be among the first researchers probably ever to spend so much time so close to wolf packs. This is also around the time that radio frequency tagging was becoming a research tool, and so scientists were able to tag individual wolves and find out exactly how they moved and behaved within a larger social structure.
Overall, Mech spent 24 summers studying the Ellesmere Island wolves, and this is where he was first able to understand their social structure and interpersonal dynamics and how they interacted with each other. This is where it dawned on him that the previous research about alpha wolves was totally wrong. Because again, before this point, researchers had only studied wolves in a captive environment and those that had been placed together from different packs. Wolves in this scenario will absolutely fight for dominance, which gave Schenkel the impression that there was a hierarchical structure of aggression with an alpha wolf at the top, as opposed to the reality, which is that different groups and unrelated individuals will struggle for resources and social capital when in close proximity. And this is exactly what we now find in the wild after studying wolf packs in modern times. Packs who get too close to each other can fight for territory, and they can absolutely kill each other. In fact, wolf pack on wolf pack violence is one of the major causes of wolf mortality in the wild. But there’s no alpha or beta stuff happening with any of this, it’s just a straightforward conflict over space and resources, just like you find with every other living organism on the planet, from single-celled organisms to human beings.
This whole experience led Mech to the monumental discovery that wolfpacks are simply families. Yes, it really is that simple. Packs are made up of one breeding pair, i.e., the parents, and their cubs. That’s a wolfpack. Packs can be as small as four wolves, just the parents and two kids. On average, though, it’s about six to ten wolves. Big packs in places like Yellowstone, where there’s lots of room to roam and expand, those can be larger and more complex family units, but they’re still families. They’re just your Thanksgiving family, the kind of family that you and I usually only see around the holidays, but these wolves are hanging out together all the time with their uncles and aunts and in-laws and cousins and grandpappies, and so on. The druid wolfpack in Yellowstone ballooned all the way up to 37 wolves in 2001. Sometimes these larger packs even have more than one breeding pair. But wolves don’t inbreed, so that only happens if an additional unrelated female joins the pack. This is a very rare situation today, and only about 10-15% of packs had more than one breeding pair in the past, before the decline of wolf populations with the introduction of human encroachment and fur trapping. And so, to see what happens to a community of wolves with unlimited space and resources that can stretch out unimpeded is to really put to bed the myth of the alpha wolf. It’s a family, sometimes a big family, but it’s always communal, and with no real top of the pyramid in any sense at all other than what you find at home with your own parents.
What you’re seeing when you note certain behaviors that might signal dominance or authority is simply parent and child social structures. In other situations, and with the alpha myth dispelled, it became clear to researchers that sometimes things just came down to individual personalities inside wolfpacks. Just like what happens among individual people. We don’t need any Greek letters to define that, and in fact, it’s just not a real thing that any data backs up in human society, either. More on that in a minute.
Mech originally tried to correct the record in a 1999 article he wrote explaining where the misconception about alpha wolves came from, and further explaining that the pair in charge of a pack were just the parents. He also tried for years to convince his publisher to stop printing the book that started the whole alpha myth, but it wasn’t until 2022 that he finally succeeded, and they agreed to pull it from the shelves.
“I clearly remember the moment I realized that on Ellesmere Island,” Mech once said in an interview. “My first thought was: “Wow.” Then I realized that my own book had helped to spread this mistaken idea.”
The only thing that sort of comes anywhere close to the idea of an alpha wolf is the part of the cultural process where one wolf will decide to leave the pack and go off into the wild by themselves to start their own pack. This wolf somehow decides to assume a leadership role and begin their own community. This is called dispersal. We don’t totally know what determines this, as like, with the big Yellowstone packs, if there are enough resources around then wolves stick around in pretty large numbers together.
There is a fascinating bit of research that could shed light on not only dispersal but also some of the characteristics of a so-called alpha personality in wolves and humans. There’s a paper from 2022 published in the journal Nature about the parasite toxoplasmosis gondii. T gondii is a thing I’ve been fascinated by for years, and sometime I might dedicate some time to making a video essay about it, but it’s the parasite that humans find most often by interacting with cat litter. It famously completes its life cycle by invading mice and altering their psychology, making them less afraid of cats, and less likely to avoid places they know cats will be, like if they smell cat urine, they just won’t scurry away from it anymore. And it makes them more likely to be eaten. So the paper in Nature found that wolves infected with t. Gondii were similarly less risk-averse, and they were more likely to engage in dangerous behavior. The infection predicted pretty well which wolves would choose to go off into dispersal and try to start their own packs. The results aren’t limited to wolves, either, there’s a significant and growing body of research across species into t. Gondii and its psychological effects. There’s some research that suggests it has similar effects on people, too. It’s entirely possible that the alpha phenomenon people are noticing and describing and attempting to emulate is actually a fairly anti-social altered state of mind brought about by a parasite that’s manipulating its host into riskier and riskier behaviors so that it’ll die in a specific way that’ll allow the parasite to continue its life cycle. So that’s kind of fascinating. I have about a third of a novel written where an adapted form of t. Gondii is the catalyst for a zombie invasion. I started it before The Last of Us was a thing, but it still feels a little too close to that, though I might revisit it at some point and finish it out.
Okay, at this point, you might be thinking that wolves are just too far away from humans to measure the applicability of their social dynamics to ours. And well, I would say then why would you have ever thought that the alpha thing would apply to people to begin with, if that’s true? But whatever. So let’s take a look at some of our closer relatives to see what we can find about whether or not human alpha males are a real thing or just made-up influencer slop.
Humans are primates. The closest living relatives to us in the primate family are bonobos and chimpanzees; they both share about 98% of their DNA with us. Almost exactly the same. Look at us, you can barely tell the difference.
Lots of misogynist talking points over the years have come from the idea that chimpanzee society specifically has a fairly male-dominated culture. But we also have a lot of evidence that makes this not super straightforward. First of all, chimpanzees and bonobos have very different social structures, with bonobos being much more communal and exhibiting more pro-social behavior. Second, and this is really important, the last common ancestor to each of these primates is found six million years ago. The two are way more closely related to each other than they are to us.
And here’s a massive and pretty definitive data point that runs directly in the face of the manosphere talking points. A brand-new giant meta-analysis of tons of research into primate social structures has blown the lid off of the idea of alpha males in primate societies now, too. In the middle of 2025, a team composed of researchers from two countries, Germany and France, painstakingly reviewed data collected from 253 populations of 121 different primate species and uncovered the truth behind alpha males in primate society. The team said that before this point, the understanding was that most primates lived in a male-dominated hierarchical society, but the science is very clear about the fact that this is not true. In fact, societies of primates where males dominated in all aggressive contact with females were extremely rare across species. The societies of primates where males dominated tended to be polygynous, and the species themselves expressed more sexually dimorphic anatomical changes, such as where females underwent obvious physical changes when ovulating. And inside societies where females had more control over mating, the female members tended to dominate. The main thing to note here is that contests between male and female primates are way more common than previously thought. Half of all contests, in fact, involve a male and female positioned against each other. And the researchers found that males won out in only about 17% of the groups they had measurements for.
Another really interesting bit of research I came across in this analysis is the fact that male reproduction success was greater within bonobo populations than chimpanzees. So if you’re looking to manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate to model your dating life after, the research we have into primate reproduction success says that’s a bad idea. Not to mention, of course, the data into actual human dating success, which I’m about to get into next. Stick around for that and find out what the science about human attractiveness says. Don’t listen to toxic manosphere bullshit peddlers. Just learn about the real science and live in reality. Let’s do that right now, and if you’re a man out there who’s a little lost and looking for something to help you on your journey into a healthy adult partnership, why not look at the data we have into how this stuff actual works in the real world, as opposed to big dumb aggressive idiots who literally have no idea about anything and have a handle on absolutely nothing excepting grifting? I don’t know, I vote for the science. Let’s put the alpha male myth to rest, and let’s get in on the real evidence behind what society for actual humans looks like. Ready set go. Jump on that when that’s ready. I’ll see you over there when we’re all sigmas.
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