Imagine if phrenology caught on as the latest pop-culture dipshit trend.
"My bumpy skull means I'm preternaturally predisposed to be polygamous and misogynist, and I'm just looking for a girl who has a compatible set of head bumps."
"If you can't handle me at my alimentivenest, you don't deserve me at my inhabitivenest."
- languages evolve, and the origin is nothing more than a curio today. People use the term "alpha" to mean a thing that exists in humans, even if it never did in wolves.
- this thing is called by the rest of the population "being and asshole" and as such i find the self identification of those people very usefull and time saving.
To be more precise, Shenkel's work was discredited by the collective efforts of numerous scientists studying wolf behaviour. Probably the most notable of these was David Mech. His book "The Wolf" was based on Shenkel's work, and his own research on wolves in captivity, and was really the work that popularized the "alpha" nonsense in the public mind.
After numerous studies of wolves in the wild failed to bear out these conclusions, Mech later concluded that his work was wrong, and got The Wolf removed from publication.
Peter Gibson, the guy who discovered non-celiac gluten sensitivity, retracted his own study a few years later, but it had already become a fad diet, so it just stuck. That being said, there have been some studies that seem to confirm its existence, but the evidence is pretty thin. (To be clear, celiac disease and wheat allergies are 100% proven and can be reliably tested for).
Don't "alpha males", as they describe themselves, typically prefer submissive women?
I wonder if this discourse sounds hilarious to a Greek person wondering why Angloids keep referring to themselves by letters of their alphabet.
I've heard this debunk a lot over the years, and I don't disbelieve it, but is it not the case that one or two animals (wolves or otherwise) in a group will be the "bosses" or something close to being dominant over the others? Is all of that internal power struggling we see in groups/families of animals not really what it seems? Or is the "alpha" stuff different from that? Or does it only apply to wolves, and "alphas" do exist in other animal species?
Yours, confused and uneducated,
u/58008
TIL!
