Posted By crates on January 31, 2009

          Plutarch tells a story, perhaps apocryphal,  about Julius Caesar and his party as they passed through a small Alpine village.  His friends jokingly asked whether even in such an isolated and poor setting men still strived and scrabbled for power and office.  Caesar very seriously declared that he would rather be the foremost man in a place like that, than the second man in Rome.

      Everybody is familiar with how people strive in various ways to achieve status.  This status can be expressed in many ways.  It can be in politics, business, sports, the arts…actually it is found in almost every human endeavor.  Any where there is a group of people there will be striving for some sort of status.

          This sort of behavior can be seen especially in social animals of all sorts.  In various primate societies, for example, there is almost always a hierarchial system of status…the number one dominant male, number two position, etc.  In extreme cases it is these one or two dominant males that get to reproduce with most of the females of the group.  As the theory goes, this type of behavior favors those males who are best able to achieve and keep these dominant positions–the most fit, strongest, etc.   In this way the most fit males are passing on the most genes to the descendants of the group.

          In a small social group this type of behavior could conceivably result in rapid evolutionary change.   Variations of this hierarchial status system exist in many forms in many species.  Take for example the lek behavior of prairie chickens and the Uganda Kob whose males set up “breeding arenas” in an area and physically defend it against other males.  The most central arenas are the most desirable, held by only the strongest males, and the females will usually pass right by the outer arenas to breed with the two or three most central males.

          In the human species this type of behavior has achieved a subtlety that might tend to hide its evolutionary roots, but the primary motivation for the behavior is still there…the unconscious desire to perpetuate one’s genes–that old biological imperative that affects so much of our behavior despite our tendency to deny the existence of innate behavior in our psyches.

      Caesar, despite his undeniable status in Rome, only had one known child, a daughter, although some have speculated that Brutus was his son by his lifelong love, Servilla.  Caesar, however, was famous for his affairs with the wives of most of the leading men of Rome.    Today of course there are many would-be Caesars whose original biological imperatives toward reproduction has been subsumed into status seeking…the means, achieving status, has become the end in itself.

       There are many examples of behavior in animals where the original behavior has been changed, almost ritualized, into other avenues.

       It is interesting to note that reproductive success does not only go to the largest and strongest males…sometimes it goes to the males with the sneakiest strategies.  For example in the Australian Cuttlefish (Cephalopoda) there is a vying of the large males for the smaller females with the larger males often having the greatest reproductive success.  However there is a second type of male which is smaller and which mimics the female in its behavior and color displays.  This smaller male will often insinuate itself into a group of larger males which are fighting over a female.   Apparently the larger males mistake it for a female and don’t attack it.  As the larger males fight over the female, the smaller male then mates with the female and then slips away.  

               Genetic studies have also revealed that “getting a little on the side” also exists even in some monogamous species.  The females often will mate with males other than their mates.  This type of behavior also occurs in such social systems as baboon troops where low caste males sometimes “get lucky” when the dominant males are looking the other way.

                     What counts is reproductive success, no matter how it is achieved.

Categories: Evolution, nature
Tags: Caesar, dominance hierarchies, Evolution, levels of hierarchy, nature, social organizations, Status seeking