A new study released in the Science Magazine, “Life at the Top: Rank and Stress in Wild Male Baboons,” sheds new light on the damaging health impact of being the alpha male if you are a baboon and hints at negative impacts for us human guys too.
ABSTRACT: In social hierarchies, dominant individuals experience reproductive and health benefits, but the costs of social dominance remain a topic of debate. Prevailing hypotheses predict that higher-ranking males experience higher testosterone and glucocorticoid (stress hormone) levels than lower-ranking males when hierarchies are unstable but not otherwise. In this long-term study of rank-related stress in a natural population of savannah baboons (Papio cynocephalus), high-ranking males had higher testosterone and lower glucocorticoid levels than other males, regardless of hierarchy stability. The singular exception was for the highest-ranking (alpha) males, who exhibited both high testosterone and high glucocorticoid levels. In particular, alpha males exhibited much higher stress hormone levels than second-ranking (beta) males, suggesting that being at the very top may be more costly than previously thought.
So maybe being the alpha male isn’t all it’s cracked up to be afte all. You win but you lose because you spend all your time worrying about how to defend the crown. When it comes to baboons, this is really all about sexual opportunities. But as it turns out the Beta male gets more than a little too without all the headaches.
Is there a human analogy here? I dunno but it sure is interesting to think about.
Photo by Flowcom
It’s all about balance, isn’t it? Alpha’s don’t have a very good hold on balance, from what I have seen.
While it may be irrelevant to note that we share a lot of genetic material with these apes, it would be germane to note that the genes that express cerebral development different not in composition but instead in mass. This means that an ape’s prefrontal cortex is only different in the quantity of neurons produced as a fetus. All this means is there could very well be a correlation between this Alpha male plague between both of our species since we are so similar and research has already shown that stress kills. More importantly, stress is a reaction that was… Read more »