[csneeky]

Scientists are employees in many contexts (almost all contexts). We may just have to agree to disagree on that one. Be they in service for an NGO, school, or oligarch.

But to say nature has no hierarchy? I suppose "hierarchy" can mean many things. But in my case I mean fitness and selection for it. The most fit are at the top. Nature tends to select for those better suited to their environment. And those best suited thrive and push the success of us all forward. It is how you got here and have what you have. Intellectual, emotional, and physical traits are all subject to this selection. The thriving academics with the most freedom are closer to the top. The best employees (however you want to define employee) tend to be given the most freedom and trust.

[pdimitar]

If you look at any nature's habitat of N kinds of animals, even there what you see can't be called a hierarchy. It's a semi-stable state on the verge of chaos which can be very easily broken by introducing a species of animals new to the area.

So no, it's not hierarchy. Lions can kill almost anything if they feel like it, but hyenas kill lions on a regular basis. Does that make them the top of the food chain in the savannah? Definitely not. It only makes a pack of hyenas stronger than a single lion or lioness.

Rock, paper, scissors. No hierarchy. It's the same in the human systems. Hierarchy is an artificial system enforced by humans and has almost zero relation to anything natural.

[csneeky]

Not all lions kill as well as other lions though. Take a snapshot of all the lions in the world alive right now and rank them by their ability to kill and the number of offspring they have. Some are better at these two things (they killed more and attracted more mates). This is quantifiable and trivial to fit into a hierarchical scheme of some kind.

It isn't hard to extract similar hierarchies from other species...including humans.

[pdimitar]

If we're talking about a single species, sure.