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by aoanla 1383 days ago
The difficulty with this argument is what we mean by "quality". It's tautological to state that hierarchies select for "qualities that enable you to be higher on the hierarchy"; it's much more debatable as to the nature of those qualities (and, indeed, that the existence of the hierarchy itself doesn't change the fitness surface, so that the advantageous qualities are different to what they might have been without it). See, eg, the amount of energy antlered deer (especially males) expend on having large, healthy antlers, purely to compete with other male deer. "Having large antlers" is a "quality" that has very little adaptive value outside of the conditions created by the fact of a hierarchy itself.
1 comments
hypertele-Xii 1381 days ago
> See, eg, the amount of energy antlered deer (especially males) expend on having large, healthy antlers, purely to compete with other male deer.

Deers have antlers for reasons other than competing with other deer. To defend themselves from predators.

Since they have them, they use them to settle differences in quality. In this case, quality of self-defence.

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watwut 1381 days ago
None of that is hierarchy as we normally use the term.
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hypertele-Xii 1380 days ago
I can't help you if you're determined to normalize nonsense, but that's precisely what 'hierarchy' means. Perhaps you're tunnel visioning on a particular kind of hierarchy, a violent dominance hierarchy. But those haven't been a thing in social animals for a while now, because tyrants meet untimely ends when the herd grows wise.
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msrenee 1379 days ago
>Perhaps you're tunnel visioning on a particular kind of hierarchy, a violent dominance hierarchy. But those haven't been a thing in social animals for a while now, because tyrants meet untimely ends when the herd grows wise.

Violent dominance is a very good way to describe hierarchy in many extant social mammals. Tyrants arise every day in both human and non-human animals. We aren't a century removed from one of the worst here in 2022. Are you thinking of eusocial mammals? The'yre closer to what you're describing here.

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