[msrenee]

If you've ever watched a herd of horses, you'd know that's not true. Dominance bubbles to the top. Pushiness bubbles to the top. If the animal is also a decent leader, then great. A lot of the time it's insecure and too busy trying to maintain its position and the rest of the herd ends up harried and banged up.

Seen it in dogs too, seen it a million times in people. Those are more artificial situations though.

[hypertele-Xii]

You are proving my point. Strength and leadership are survival qualities to wild herd animals. The hierarchy allows those qualities to rise to the top. It is the herd that collectively decides to give space to the individual with those qualities. The "alpha horse" does not "dominate" the herd; no single individual can match the strength of an entire herd. The herd gives permission for the qualities to reach top of hierarchy, because those are the qualities the herd wants to select for.

If the animals making up the hierarchy disagrees with the individual on top, they remove it from the hierarchy. Easily. That's the whole point of herds, packs, and hierarchies. Together stronger than alone.

[watwut]

"qualities" and "quality" are two different things. Pushiness is quality as in "property", but not "quality" as in "the degree of excellence of something." In this case, lower quality individual bubbles on top, cause other horses don't want to deal with jerks aggression.

> If the animals making up the hierarchy disagrees with the individual on top, they remove it from the hierarchy. Easily. That's the whole point of herds, packs, and hierarchies. Together stronger than alone.

You write about it as if animals were rational systems thinkers and that is just not so.

[hypertele-Xii]

> Pushiness is quality as in "property", but not "quality" as in "the degree of excellence of something."

It's quality as in the degree of excellence of pushiness.

> In this case, lower quality individual bubbles on top, cause other horses don't want to deal with jerks aggression.

That would be a higher quality individual, according to the horses.

> You write about it as if animals were rational systems thinkers and that is just not so.

We're talking about behavior that evolved millions of years ago in crustaceans, the serotonin brain system that specializes in regulating social hierarchies in animals, is still present and functioning today in you and the horses. Attribution of rationality is on your part, and in no way diminishes the effectiveness of the social brain, and the hierarchy which it encodes.

[msrenee]

I feel like you misunderstood my post. I said that pushy, dominant horses end up at the top of the hierarchy. That pushy, dominant horse might be a good leader or it might be insecure or just plain mean and spend its time chasing the rest of the herd around and picking fights. I think I used the phrase "harried and banged up" to describe the state of the herd in this situation. I suppose that in the long run, evolution-wise, that animal's offspring are less likely to survive. During its lifetime, however, it beats up the other horses and they lose body condition as the dominant horse can't chill out and let the band graze.

[hypertele-Xii]

Sounds like a local optimum, a difficult, unsolved problem permeating everything. How do you know if the good you've got is the best you can have?

Hierarchy is one approximate solution, but hardly the globally optimal one.