[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.