4. The Alpha Fish

One winter afternoon in New York a woman showed up at my hotel with an animal story. She was a psychiatrist on the staff of a Long Island hospital, and like many another suburban New Yorker she took special delight in winter as the season when one feeds the birds. A little group of seven chickadees, those most impudent of feathered suburbanites, had become her favorites. They would wait for her outside her back door, and scramble with each other as they fed from her hand. Then on a recent morning something went wrong.

It was cold, the ground snow-covered; bushes and trees glistened with ice. Half-a-dozen huddled chickadees were waiting for her, but they would not approach her hand. On such an ice-embroidered morning they could only be hungry. She wondered, was she wearing the wrong colors? What was there in her presence that had enlisted their sudden disapproval? She put the food in a pan and stepped away. Still they would not approach. Then off in the frozen shrubbery there was a flash and a flutter, and the seventh bird swooped down to the pan. Immediately all joined it in a greedy breakfast. Alpha had arrived.

Psychoanalysis is frequently described as the science of the unconscious mind. Sigmund Freud's discovery of unconscious forces systematically contributing to human decision must be regarded -- however we may differ on estimates of Freud -- as one of the major achievements of science. In 1908 (it was the year I was born: I mention it only as a point of departure for younger readers delving into the fossil past) Freud and many of his disciples met at Salzburg. From that moment what had been the work of one mind became the movement of many. All embraced and continued to embrace the principle of unconscious forces. But before long the pioneers divided, some to vanish in the tortured trails of mentality's jungle.

We might grant the reality of the unconscious mind; but what were its ingredients? Freud, particularly in those earlier years, chose sexuality as the primordial force driving or distorting our hidden processes. For both Carl Jung and Alfred Adler the preoccupation with sex was too much. Jung specifically rejected Freud's insistence on the lifelong consequences produced by the intense sexual motivation of the very young child in its relation to the father and mother. He saw childhood as dominated by fantasy -- fantasies with archetypes expressed by all humanity's myths and religions -- with adolescence as the critical period in which the inner world of fantasy must make its peace, however painfully, however successfully, with the outer world of reality. Out of such preoccupations Jung left us the words "introvert" and "extrovert."

Alfred Adler took a path entirely his own, along which he very nearly vanished. He has left us as a legacy, it is true -- the term "inferiority complex." But he was neither as profound a thinker as Jung, nor as persuasive an advocate as Freud. Perhaps also his psychology brought shudders more and more severe to those students increasingly enchanted by the equali-tarian ideal. Whatever was the cause, Adler became as unfashionable as a hat with ostrich plumes. Yet if we are to gain some perspective on the alpha fish, then we must dig up Adler. His concern was not with sex but with power.

Jung and Freud could to a degree be reconciled. Adler and Freud could not. Freudian acceptance of the unpleasant as a state of increasing tension, of the pleasant as tension's release, did not accord with the Adlerian drive upward. Freud's increasing reliance on the life-force arrayed against the death wish likewise fell far outside Adler's preoccupation with power. And there was always the central theme of sexuality and the family which was so to mesmerize a generation of Freudians. But Adler saw all in a social context. He wrote that there are "no problems in life which cannot be grouped under three main problems -- occupational, social, and sexual." That the occupational should be placed first among his categories was to the Freudian an absurdity. In his Problems of Neurosis he wrote, "Everyone's goal is one of superiority, but in the case of those who lose their courage and self-confidence, it is diverted from the useful to the useless side of life."

A few years later, in 1932, he stated his central thesis with greatest force: "Whatever name we give it, we shall always find in human beings this great line of activity -- the struggle to rise from an inferior position to a superior position, from defeat to victory, from below to above. It begins in our earliest childhood; it continues to the end of our lives." Adler was writing solely about the human being and the main engine driving our unconscious forces. He took no evolutionary point of view. But I will point to my earlier chapter in which I wrote of innate aggressiveness driving any organism to fulfill genetic potential in its responses to an environment. We deal in the animal with the same force that Adler describes in man.

Studies of animal behavior, and particularly those of our primate family which have so proliferated in the past decade, tend to erode the authority of Freud. Sexuality is not what we thought it in the life of the animal, as it is not what Freud thought it in the lives of men. The Dutch ethologist Adriaan Kortlandt wrote: "There is an increasing awareness that classic Freudian doctrine is a typical product of fin de siecle society. The great problem of our time is no longer sex but aggression and fear." Kortlandt's comment, fifteen years ago, becomes more prophecy than statement when one meditates on more recent, more explosive years.

Although Alfred Adler never achieved the elegance of Freud in a sense either scientific or stylistic (and one is tempted to wonder, occasionally, if his writing appeared originally as a syndicated newspaper column), still I suspect that as investigations proceed more deeply into man's evolutionary nature we shall witness his resurrection. Adler is relevant, whereas Freud is not. Adler presents answers (whether wrong or right) for the questions that burn us. Freud speaks for less dangerous days. Above all, it is not Freud but Adler whose conclusions about man are today being reinforced by evidence gathered from that natural world of which man is a part. We may discuss the alpha fish -- bird, cow, elephant, monkey, lizard, rat, wolf, cricket, elk, lion, man -- as a phenomenon all but universal in social species; we shall find little in the Oedipus complex to guide us. But Adler's central thesis, which I have quoted, could have been written by Konrad Lorenz in On Aggression.

The struggle upward, the striving to rise from an inferior to a superior position, from below to above, has as its end product the alpha. There are some social species -- usually those gathering in huge numbers like the starling or herring -- in which individual leadership is impossible and the struggle does not take place. Occasionally men behave like a leaderless herd, whether impelled by fear or frenzy, but such is abnormal behavior. We must go far to find a human society lackingjjresi^ dents or kings, chiefs or elders, generals or captains, oracles or prophets, individuals commanding greater influence than their fellows. Claude L£vi-Strauss has doubted that material benefits could ever explain why some people try to be leaders. There are chiefs

because there are, in any human group, men who unlike most of their companions enjoy prestige for its own sake, feel a strong appeal to responsibility, and to whom the burden of public affairs brings its own reward. These individual differences are certainly emphasized and "played up" by the different cultures, and to unequal degrees. But their clear-cut existence in a society as little competitive as the Nambikuara strongly suggests to my mind that their origin itself is not cultural. They are rather part of those psychological raw materials out of which any given culture is made.

The alpha fish is everywhere. A glorious kudu bull, or a rhesus monkey with tail raised to signal his alphaness, he exists wherever there is organized society. As in human cultures, the status struggle may vary -- low in the chimpanzee, high in the baboon -- and it may also vary even within the societies of a given species. But man did not invent it, and out of the striving upward comes the hierarchy of rank order, which sometimes our lives depend on. Perhaps we should look at its history.

In 1920 the British amateur ornithologist Eliot Howard presented the natural sciences with the concept of territory in animal affairs. In 1922, just two years later, a Norwegian scientist, T. Schjelderup-Ebbe, published in Germany his study of the social psychology of the chicken yard. It centered on his discovery of the pecking order in a flock of hens. From alpha to omega there is a rank ordeFof dominance within the flock, aiid each hen has the right to peck those below it in the order, while none has the right to peck back. Thus alpha has the right to peck all, whereas none can peck her. And omega, of course, the last in line, gets pecked by everybody and can peck back at none. In just two years the twin principles of territory and dominance, the concepts at present most absorbing for students of animal behavior, came into being.

Howard, despite his study of innumerable bird species, was conservative in confining his conclusions to bird life, the world he knew. Like Howard, Schjelderup-Ebbe went on to study sparrows, pheasants, ducks and geese, cockatoos, parrots, canaries. He was anything, however, but conservative. "Despotism," he wrote, "is the basic idea of the world, indissolubly bound up with all life and existence." He went beyond life: "There is nothing that does not have a despot. . . . The storm is despot over the water; the lightning over the rock; water over the stone it dissolves." He even recalled a proverb that God is despot over the Devil.

Getting carried away with a good idea is human, forgivable, perhaps even necessary if anyone is to listen. An immediate consequence of Howard's modesty was that no one heard about territory for years. But there is little doubt that the man who discovered the pecking order got carried a bit too far and succeeded only in giving his discovery an unattractive odor. When in later years continental ethology began to take form, Konrad Lorenz alone seems to have been impressed by the significance of dominance in social structure, and some of the most memorable stories in his King Solomon's Ring bring us the intimate details of the status struggle in jackdaw life. Yet when as late as 1953 his colleague Niko Tinbergen published Social Behavior in Animals, he gave pecking orders less than a page and seems to have regarded them as a peculiar obsession of American science. And it is true that in the 1930's the investigation of dominance crossed the Atlantic and became the particular preserve of three Americans.

It was G. K. Noble of the American Museum of Natural History who gave us the definition of territory as "any defended area." And, while I am not sure, it may also have been from Noble's studies that we have inherited the all-purpose term "the alpha fish." He made many experiments with fish, including the startling one with little tropical swordtails which I reported in African Genesis and perhaps should recall here. So obsessed were the males with rank order that though the water in their tank was cooled to a degree where they lost all interest in females, still they continued among themselves an unremitting struggle for status. It was one of the earliest experiments, to be confirmed later in hundreds of species, demonstrating that it is not love, necessarily, that makes the world go around.

In the meantime -- and beginning at an even earlier date -- C. R. Carpenter's classic studies of wild primates were revealing not only the role of territory in primate social life but what was to become far more important in the studies of many observers, the role of status. Carpenter developed means of measuring degrees of dominance in the gibbon in Thailand, in the howling-monkey troops that he watched for so long in a Panama rain forest, and in the colony of Indian rhesus monkeys that he established on tiny Santiago Island, off Puerto Rico. The measurements revealed nothing so crude as the no-peck-back arrangements of the chicken yard. Rather, Carpenter found rank to consist of varying tendencies of one animal to precede another in privilege and leadership. Although occasionally beta would beat alpha to the fruit tree, far more often it would be the reverse, and alpha's rank would be confirmed.

Carpenter's principal contribution concerned the variety of expressions of dominance. In the rhesus it was severe and relatively clean-cut; he referred to it as a "high dominance gradient." The arboreal howler, in contrast, has a low gradient. The howler has rank, though we might say he seldom pulls it. Out of all these early studies two generalizations appeared which the multitude of recent studies confirm: In any society of monkeys or apes, a degree of dominance among males will be evident, and there will always be one or more individuals with greater influence than others. And iri such societies adults will always be dominant over juveniles, males always dominant over females. The gibbon is the only species we know in which the female even nears the dominance of her mate.

Noble extended studies of dominance to fish and reptiles, Carpenter to primates. It was W C. Allee., however, together with various associates at Chicago, who in the 1930's was making the most exhaustive investigations_of Schjelderup-Ebbe's original discovery. The rigid pecking order among chickens was confirmed with only minor deviations. (Years later a study showed this to be no crude peculiarity of domestication. Jungle fowl have precisely the same social order as their domesticated descendants.) But only in the white-throated sparrow could Allee find a pecking order of equal severity. In pigeons, for example, much the same rank order would be accomplished, but, as in Carpenter's monkeys, through probability of dominance. The subordinate pigeon might peck back, but with low chances of winning. And so Allee divided rank order into two categories: the peck-right, in which the subordinate cannot and will not peck back, and peck-dominance, in which he may peck back but will probably lose. And out of it all came the broader concept of hierarchy.

Any society has as its basic structure a hierarchy of members unequally disposed. Perhaps Allee's most fascinating report in his Social Life of Animals concerns the studies of the Dionne quintuplets by a group of investigators from the University of Toronto. The quintuplets were identical -- developed, in other words, from a single fertilized egg. Yet from an early date they developed a social hierarchy among themselves that varied little as time went by. Such criteria as who pushed whom and who pushed back, who initiated actions and who followed, all went into the grading of hierarchy. And while it is true that the alpha Dionne ranked always highest in mental tests, still the largest and strongest ranked never higher than third in the social hierarchy. Allee wrote: "Whatever the reason, we have come to an interesting, and I think important conclusion, which is that animals with exactly the same heredity may still develop, even at an early age, graded social differences showing that one is not exactly equal to the other."

What, then, is alphaness?

The mystery of human personality can no more than a summer storm be confined to logic's prison. Neither the apprehensions of genes in their chromosomes nor the tidy comprehensions of environment's command, neither confessions on a couch nor the conjunction of planets will ever quite explain why you are you and I am I. A leaf flutters quietly from October's bush; a child turns over in bed; footsteps pass beneath a window; the last eye of spark drowses on the hearth. Of such ingredients, perhaps, are we compounded. As we cannot know them, we cannot explain them; as we cannot foresee them, we cannot arrange them. The Utopian may in all petulance fling his back on life. The eugenicist, in all gloom, may inspect his navel. The mathematician's cup runs dry. Either life is so much larger than we are, or we are so much larger than life: even this we cannot know for sure. There are mysteries which to some descendant species may be as clear as words on a wall. But you and I, human messengers, deliver poems that we shall never quite understand. We may read them, ponder them, debate and recognize their mysteries, tell them like tales by a fire. Yet something will always lie beyond us. And perhaps it is just as well.

Such is the mystery of the alpha fish. Where does he come from? What makes him tick? We may recognize him, follow him, applaud him, put him to the most useful of purposes. But while many have attempted to describe him, few have been the observers brash enough to attempt to explain him.

Konrad Lorenz, considering his small, crow-like jackdaws, gave as good a description as any of dominant birds: "Not only physical strength, but also personal courage, energy, and even self-assurance of every individual bird are decisive in the maintenance of the pecking order." There is something which at first glance may strike the reader as anthropomorphic in the description; yet I am certain that almost every student of animals will, in general, agree with it. A quality for which we have no other word but "character" is an impression which must be accepted in any description of the alpha. It is something that impressed Fraser Darling in his long observations of Scottish red deer. Two stags will fight only if they are equals. Fo J a long time they will size each other up, then fight or move off. He considered the final estimate to be psychological rather than physical.

We have inherited our brute impression of the master animal from the good old nineteenth-century days of Tennyson's "nature red in tooth and claw." Yet, while might is helpful, it presents no final answer in animal dispositions. C. K. Brain, putting together a captive troop of vervet monkeys in Rhodesia, found that his alpha was smaller and two years younger than the omega. The most obvious characters of the alpha were confidence and a steady gaze. When Brain introduced an older, stronger adult male to the troop, the animal was so badly beaten that within a few days, demoralized, he had to be removed. He died of injuries.

The situation of the vervets well illustrates the rule that size and strength cannot alone guarantee dominance. After a period of observing the famous monkey colonies in Japan in the summer of 1966, C. R. Carpenter described to me a large colony in which one of the three highest-ranking males was thirty-five years old and had not been in a fight in ten years. Kortlandt, reporting on a troop of forest chimpanzees in the eastern Congo, observed a similar situation. The undoubted alpha male, deferred to by the strongest, was at least forty years old.

Seniority may be a quality entering into the alpha, despite infirmities of age, simply because the group has become habituated to his leadership. But a remarkable study of the human being published a few years ago by William D. Altus, while taking nothing away from the virtues of seniority, added much to its mystery.

Ever since the days of Sir Francis Galton evidence has accumulated that eminent men tend to be firstborn sons beyond any* ,4. factor of chance. No one paid much attention; too many explanations, such as the laws of primogeniture, were available. Later studies of Rhodes Scholars, of Who's Who, of distinguished scientists in America, all showed much the same disproportion of oldest sons. But although primogeniture was a factor of little significance in the United States, still the environmental advantages of being the firstborn offered ample explanation for success. But then came a disquieting moment, Lewis Terman's publication of his analysis of 1,000 "gifted" children. By "gifted," Terman referred to children with an IQ of 140 or higher, representative of the top one percent of the population. And again the preponderance of oldest sons accorded almost perfectly with earlier studies of the eminent.

We know that the IQ test, while designed to measure innate intelligence, is affected to a degree by such environmental influences as the home and cultural pressures. Even so, Terman's findings were incisive enough to be disturbing. But psychologists like Altus had to wait until 1964 to gain a larger sample and more objective criteria to explore mysteries that will remain for a long while unexplained. By then the American experiment known as the National Merit Scholarship had taken such hold as to enlist the young ambitions of all who had ambition at all. Examinations were taken across the land, and from those high-school graduates whom Alfred Adler might have described as supreme in their upward strivings, 1,618 became finalists in the competition. We do not deal with arguable IQ. We do not deal with adult eminence, supported or unsupported by wealth, name, social position. We deal, so far as it is humanly possible, with a democratic competition, open to all, of representatives of a human population of 200 million. And of 568 from two-child families, 66 percent were firstborn. Of 414 from three-child families, 52 percent were firstborn. Even from students of four-child families, an impossible 59 percent were firstborn.

Now, one must inspect such figures with that skepticism which all statistics should invite. We must recognize, for example, that the firstborn may well be the first to enter the competition for National Merit scholarships. The younger ones may not yet have had the chance to prove themselves. And one must recall the environmentalist argument that the oldest child has advantages of years of parental monopoly, of parental ambitions, of undivided parental pride. But then one encounters a hollow voice from behind the statistical draperies.

The distribution applies only to the 1,618 finalists. To the enormous number of superior high-school students who took the examinations, and who should be comparably affected by such advantages and influences, the distribution applies not at all. Is it, then, intelligence that is affected by seniority of birth? Or is it, beyond that, some quality of alphaness, the upward surge, the drive to achieve? Altus concluded: "Ordinal position at birth has been shown to be related to significant social parameters, though the reasons behind the relations are as yet unknown or at best dimly apprehended."

Seniority, like intelligence itself, has something to do with alphaness, though just what we do not know. Adler called the oldest son "power-hungry," and it well may be. Ellen Cullen, one of Tinbergen's most brilliant Oxford students, made a study of kittiwakes, a distinctive species of gull that nests on cliffs along Britain's west coast. The female kittiwake lays, as a rule, two eggs on successive days, and'they hatch in the same order. The sibling older by a single day pecks the younger and becomes dominant. But it need not be so. In herds of thirty or forty African buffalo, seniority plays a part in the ranking. Alpha, however, may or may not be the oldest.

Virility of course was regarded as a primary attribute of dominance when we looked to sex for answers, and an early experiment with ringdoves seemed to confirm it. Two flocks, one male, one female, each had its rank order. In the female flock the omega was injected with the male hormone testosterone, and in eight days rose to alpha. In the male flock the omega, similarly injected, rose as high as second rank. Maleness seemed an undoubted determinant.

Something comparable but ambiguous is suggested by a curious observation by Ralph Masure, working with Allee. In a flock of female pigeons a bird called RY, for her red and yellow marking bands, was omega. For some weeks RY occupied this lowly spot, and then a change got into her, and it was not an injection. What happened to RY they could not guess, but she rose in six days to third rank. Still she was dominated by the top two in the order, but then the birds were allowed to mate. RY did not, and seemed quite unresponsive to male advances. When the time of mating was over and the sexes were again segregated, RY emerged as the solid, unchallengeable alpha among the females. Had she been a bisexual? Later on she was autopsied, but no physical abnormality could be found.

From the normal dominance of male over female throughout species, and from such observations as these, one would be tempted to conclude that masculinity, or even a touch of it, makes for dominance. And if ever there was a species to enhance the temptation and enforce the conclusion, it is that weird and wonderful, grotesque and unfathomable creature -- I do not refer to the human being -- the over-maligned hyena. From the time of Herodotus his name has been a synonym for cowardice. We have at times even called him a hermaphrodite. Only in the past few years have the legends been demolished. Another of Tinbergen's superb students, a young, large, blond Dutch ethologist named Hans Kruuk, has devoted his days and his nights, year after year, to hyena-watching. And he has found, among other discoveries, that, far from being a coward, the hyena is among the world's most formidable predators. It is the animal's sex life, however, that must concern us here. For while the hermaphrodite canard has long ago been dismissed, still there are elements in hyena sexual arrangements which leave the observer's eyebrows permanently lifted.

In the summer of 1968 I had the privilege of Kruuk's company in Tanzania's Serengeti. When you visit a hyena man, you become, naturally, a hyena guest. And so you find yourself in a Land Rover parked beside a hyena den -- a series of holes, probably dug originally by wart hogs, which the hyena clan has appropriated as a nursery -- while the young ones bounce and chase each other and adults sleep in the sun. Animal-watching consists mostly of waiting for something to happen. And if your companion is someone who knows more about what you are watching than any other man on earth, then animal-watching becomes the world's most civilized expe-& rience. There is the conversation, unpressed, uninterrupted by lyone c.alls, as free as a dream. There is the day in the country with the long swelling African plain below you, the few scattered flaVtopped trees like dozing sentinels, the wooded ridge a few miles away enclosing its secrets, perhaps an African cloud or two, long, slim, purple-keeled, patrolling the skies; there is even, like some ultimate gift wrapped in heaven, not the faintest possibility of exercise. And of course there are the animals, playing, yawning, greeting one another when a wanderer arrives. A good day of animal-watching should be poured into bottles, labeled with its vintage, and placed in the cellar, and if you are watching hyenas, then you will encounter a very strange flavor, for as slowly you encompass the hyena facts of life, the more surely will you discover that, like some aging voyeur, you are ignoring all before you except hyena genitals.

One of the facts of hyena life is that the female is not only larger than the male, but dominant over him. So rare is such a relation in the vertebrate world that one must suspect it came about through evolutionary quirk, an ancient mutation that, while making no sense, did no harm to prospects of survival. Such an accident befell the phalarope; she wears the bright plumage, enjoys the excitements of defending territory, while he, drab fellow, sits on the eggs. The social consequences of female dominance in the hyena are inconspicuous; but the anatomical consequences are lurid. Even Kruuk has difficulty, sometimes, distinguishing male from female at a distance of forty or fifty feet. Her attenuated clitoris, hanging down inches, can scarcely be told from a penis. And where testicles should be she has an enlarged ball of fat in perfect imitation of the scrotum.

All such observations, whether of hyenas or ringdoves, would point to a profound link, whatever its nature, between alpha-ness and the male hormone. But we immediately encounter contradictions. The rat, the jackdaw, and many another create rank order while still sexually immature. Green sunfish pursue their competitions when so young that sex can be determined only by dissection. Even accepting that the male hormone may at this age be active, we have those uncounted species in which females and young form their own social groups, excluding males, and live in a female-dominated world. Red deer in Scotland, mountain sheep in the American Rockies, elephants in Uganda, kudu in South West Africa's empty reaches, all have their female ranks, their distinct female alphas, without suggestion of masculine disposition. Neither is there evidence that an extraordinary sexual drive in the male promotes alphaness; rather it seems the other way around. The beta monkey may display no consuming interest in females. Let alpha die, however, and beta be promoted, and his sexual fires will be lighted so that he becomes a copulating hero.

So many variables enter the determination of alphaness that one faces an equation beyond solution. Strength, intelligence, maleness, courage, health, indefinable persistence, ambition, confidence -- all are involved. Allee has contributed luck, a neglected factor probably of high significance. But the most remarkable quality -- one that would occur to none but the shrewdest observer -- is political acumen.

Ethology's accumulated materials are still so scattered that one cannot yet judge how widespread political capacity is as a contributor to the making of animal presidents. It has been observed only in primates, and perhaps in none but our own devious family is wit of such selective advantage that a particular discrimination has evolved. Among primates the political aptitude of baboons received the attention of Eugene Marais, the South African naturalist who lived with a wild troop in the early years of the century. Not until 1969, however, with the publication of his lost manuscript, The Soul of the Ape, did Marais' work receive any degree of world recognition. Instead, it was the definitive study of baboon social life by Washburn and De Vore, in 1961, that not only initiated the massive observation of primates spreading like an epidemic through the 1960's, but first called significant attention to this primate aptitude.

Aside from one species, the hamadryas, the structure of the baboon troop has a central group of alpha males who not only defend the whole troop but keep order within it. Washburn and De Vore concluded that the capacity to get along with one's fellows must be a necessity in the alpha male. We deal here not with as mild a creature as the samango or colobus monkeys, but with the most belligerent citizen in the non-human primate world. That alphaness must include the capacity to suppress rugged individualism bears notice. Yet the three or four males of the central group prefer one another's company, act always in concert, never quarrel, and accept any challenge to one as a challenge to all. Were a male however strong, however intelligent, however ambitious, unable to accept these essentially political conditions of existence, he could not be an alpha baboon.

The following year, in ig62, Stuart Altmann became the first observer to draw attention to the capacity for coalition in the rhesus monkey. Among rhesus males, however, such coalitions are not between equals. The steps of rank are distinct, and alpha is an individual who must somehow maintain his rank quite on his own, though he leads a group of animals only slightly less aggressive than baboons. In this situation true political shenanigans have value. Alpha, pressed by beta, will make a temporary alliance with gamma. Or gamma, with designs on beta, will ingratiate himself with alpha. Since greatest conflict comes between adjoining ranks, such temporary alliances may take place at any social level. When Thomas Struhsaker recently published his elegant series of studies of vervet-monkey troops in Kenya's Amboseli, he found that 20 percent of all contacts between males involved temporary coalitions.

From broad enough inspection of animal examples, we can gain some appreciation for the qualities of the alpha fish, but no organizing principles. We may say that dominance occurs. And rank in the social order becomes one of Wynne-Edwards' conventional prizes pursued by conventional means. We may look at armies and governments, political or religious movements, corporation personnel or academic faculties, and we shall find the same invariable structure of rank, the same motivation from below to above, the same command by alphas as in primate troops or elephant herds. In the organization of any society of unequal beings to act as one, evolution has favored the mechanism of hierarchy. But despite his universal appearance in social orders, despite the varied testimony we have gathered concerning the nature of the beast, we still do not know what an alpha fish is.

We have been inspecting hierarchy from the top down. We have been viewing the alpha as an individual phenomenon. But the dominating cannot exist without the dominated, the leader without followers. Perhaps if we reverse our standpoint we shall penetrate the mystery more deeply. If we take a fish- eye view of the hull of the passing ship, then who knows? Perhaps we shall glimpse the captain.

For many Americans then of voting age, life has offered few experiences so exalting as the one that overcame us on a night in 1952 when, grouped around our television sets, we listened to Adlai Stevenson accept his nomination for the presidency. Tears flowed without shame. Voices choked. Hands in the dark gripped other hands, whatever hand was closest. It was as if, half a continent away, a single man struck a hidden bell, and throughout the forests of the American soul, from this tree or that, from the heart of this thicket, from the crown of that lonely pine, bells reverberated in response, bells that had never found voice before, bells unguessed joined in a wild, unpre-dicted clamor of purpose and hope, of resolve and thanksgiving. The Stevenson movement was born.

I was still living in Hollywood at that time. I had published a novel earlier in the year, and out of consequent bankruptcy had a few weeks before the nomination accepted a film assignment to pay for my folly. The contract involved a quite splendid mountain of hard cash. A few days after the nomination I went to the studio, pleaded a heart attack, varicose veins, and several unexpectedly slipped discs, and we tore up the contract. I joined the Stevenson movement and with many another mad American went to work on the campaign. I became a Follower.

Does the sense of being a follower carry some special reward? One thinks of children, the world over, playing games of follow-the-leader. It cannot be Machiavellian designs of vested interests manipulating the conditioned reflexes of the young so that as adults they will keep their proper places. One thinks of the passage of elephants in silent file; it is a predisposition that makes them so easily trained for the circus. One thinks of elk in Wyoming moving at twilight in long silhouette. One recalls the documentation of single-file antics of sea creatures: marine gars in Florida waters, first the leader, then the followers, leaping over a twig in a glistening stream; enormous mantas, in the same waters, churning in a circle like vast, insane bats; silver-sides, in Long Island Sound, leaping in a shining, continuous parade over a fisherman's line. William Beebe, off Acapulco, once thought he had found some unknown giant eel. But the eel was a string of fish, moving nose to tail.

A "following response," as ethologists usually refer to it, demonstrates in single-file behavior simply a special case. The newly hatched duckling has a response to his mother's quack, and, following her, learns who his mother is. It is the innate basis of Lorenz' famous imprinting, a learning process that occurs in a few early, critical hours of the young being's life. And it can go wrong in famous fashion. Portielje, for many years the head of the Amsterdam Zoo, hand-raised a male South American bittern who through following Portielje became hopelessly confused as to just who either of them was. When the bittern matured, he took the gloomiest possible view of female bitterns, probably feeling that they were quite the wrong sort. Only after long isolation with a female did he mate with her, and they raised several successful broods. But even then Portielje had his problems, for if he came within sight the male bittern would drive his mate off the nest and perform the ceremony of nest relief inviting the zookeeper to incubate the eggs.

The response may not always be innate. The long-maned hamadryas baboon of Ethiopia is the same animal that Egyptians held sacred and that decorates so magnificently Tutankhamen's tomb. So drastic in the life of the female is the necessity to follow that one would take it as a kindness of natural selection to have made the response instinctive. But it is learned, and learned the hard way in accordance with reinforcement theory. The big male hamadryas has a harem of four or five females who must follow him at a distance no greater than three meters. Should one stray farther, then he leaps at her and reinforces her following response by biting her neck. That following is not innate, but perhaps learned in adolescence, was demonstrated when a female raised in captivity was turned free in Ethiopia. A male promptly annexed her. But no matter how painfully he might bite her, she could not follow him. She did not know how.

We need not turn to those most obvious instances in human life where a following is achieved through the approximate techniques of the hamadryas baboon. We are concerned here, rather, with the subordinate role that is accepted, even sought, with varying responses ranging from the grudging through the docile to the enthusiastic and even ecstatic. For there is a possibility that the response of the subordinate in some fashion illuminates if it does not define the alpha.

Wynne-Edwards, with a penetrating stroke of logic, once wrote that a "hereditary compulsion to comply" must be the real key to social organization. Could none be satisfied with less than alpha, then society would become impossible. But his logic proceeded: any such innate compulsion cannot come about by direct inheritance. Since in most animal groups the alphas, through the privilege of rank, have not only greater access to females but generate in the female more insistent sexual desire, then the alphas, throughout generations, must leave descendants out of proportion to their number. If inheritance proceeded directly, then the capacity for subordination would soon be bred out of a species. But observation reveals no such tendency. Whether we consider mice or we consider men, as LeVi-Strauss pondered his Nambikuara, the proportion of alpha-tending and subordinate-tending remains about the same in every generation. The distribution of the trait, Wynne-Edwards concluded, must be controlled by group selection, occurring by random incidence in any gene pool. "The tendency to comply is renewed in every subsequent generation."

Within us, then, is the upward-pressing force that seeks competition, strives for superiority, and in the normal vertebrate society of equal opportunity allows every individual born his chance to demonstrate alphaness. But were that the only force, then organized society would be impossible and we should have only anarchy. And so there is a seemingly opposite force, a willingness to comply, to accept subordination, and -- in a majority of individuals -- to accept one's station in life as satisfactory reward for past strivings. But is not the following .response a portion of this acceptance? Is there not a successful identification with the alpha that leads to the satisfaction of compliance?

In recent ethological thought, increasing attention has been given to the attractiveness of the alpha fish. The gang of thugs ruling a baboon troop may be feared; but their attraction is such that no unruly juvenile need ever be herded back into the fold. The magnetism of the dominants keeps the troop together. Perhaps George Schaller's monumental study of the mountain gorilla offers as clear a portrait as we shall find of the social attraction generated by a dominant animal.

Schaller's observations were made in the woodlands and bamboo thickets found at an altitude of about ten thousand feet in the eastern Congo's Virunga chain of volcanoes. In the area he observed over 190 animals, almost all of whom belonged to one of nine separate groups. Each group in its search for food ranged over an area of from four to eight square miles. Occasionally a male would wander off from his group for a few days, or a previously unobserved mother and infant would join a group, but through the period of Schaller's study, groups kept a fairly consistent identity.

Group identity had its focus in a total alpha, a silverbacked male. The mountain gorilla is black, but with final physical maturity at the age of ten the silver appears on his back. In Schaller's largest group of twenty-seven individuals there were four silverbacks, but only one held command. When he rested, the group rested around him, with adolescent blackbacks frequently on the periphery. All seemed constantly aware of his movements, or took their cues from those close to him. When he moved, all moved. If he moved slowly, the group too might only gradually get under way. But if he signaled a change of activity with a rapid, stiff-legged gait or a characteristic succession of grunts, all might well run to gather in his wake.

Ethologists generally agree that it will take new and larger concepts of dominance to explain both the fear and the attraction generated by the alpha. In late 1967 M. R. A. Chance, one of Britain's most thoughtful primate students, contributed such a concept with a paper on "attention structures." Chance is at Birmingham, and has devoted much of his career to reflection, an activity sorely needed at this stage of ethology's rapid advance. His own attention was attracted by Hans Rummer's studies of the hamadryas and the intense concentration lavished by the female on her overlord's actions. When we recall that she will get her neck bitten as a reward for distraction, the concentration seems explicable. But almost no punishment or even threat enters into the relation of the silverback to his gorilla followers. And attention is as perfect.

"Broadly speaking," wrote Chance, "dominance is at present considered to be that attribute of an animal's behavior which enables it to attain an object when in competition with others. ... A more rewarding way of defining the dominance status of a supremely dominant individual is that he or she is the focus of attention of those holding subordinate status within the same group." What is important among gorillas, in other words, is not so much that the leader leads but that the followers follow.

We are now looking at the alpha fish from a properly fish-eyed viewpoint. And perhaps we may begin to understand why it is so difficult to describe alphaness in terms simply of age, of intelligence, of physical strength, or even of such qualities as persistence or determination. While we still merely penetrate more deeply the mystery of personality, may it not be that true alphaness rests on the capacity to attract and satisfy a following?

When in 1969 the Canadian social anthropologist Lionel Tiger published his astonishing book Men in Groups, he introduced to sociology the principle of the male bond, the propensity of males throughout all of Homo sapiens to gather in groups that exclude the female. In the course of his discussion he turns to the relative failure of women to achieve high political office unless their lives have been associated with men who achieved it at an earlier date. Despite all the advances of women's suffrage and the power of women's votes, little has happened. Immediately after female suffrage was introduced to Japan, for example, thirty-five women achieved national office; there are now but eleven. In Canada and the United States, women are far less likely to vote for women than they are for men. In no parliament are there over 5 percent women. The Supreme Soviet may contain 17 percent women, but it likewise retains no power; the Politburo contains none.

Tiger makes a suggestion radical in sociology: "That females only rarely dominate authority structures may reflect the female's underlying inability -- at the ethological level of 'pattern-releasing behavior' -- to affect the behavior of subordinates." To meet the outrage of feminists there is perhaps no answer but hiding in a cellar. For a resident of Rome to assure female militants that women walking down the Via Veneto, the Spanish Steps, or even through St. Peter's itself suffer not the least handicap concerning pattern-releasing behavior in the Italian male is an argument which I suspect will forward one's chances of survival not a whit. Yet one must ponder.

Admittedly, the following response of the Roman male is not precisely of the order that Tiger discusses. Yet the historic capacity of the female to command attention within a sexual context makes all the more notable her incapacity to command it within an authority context. Why should it be? Is the male bond so strong as to dictate failure? In few primate species is there a bond so strong, yet no monkey or ape society accepts female leadership. Is it possible that biology has arranged that the vulnerable primate female with her slow-growing young -- and certainly no less our own ancestral hominids -- herself normally possesses following response only for the male?

Whatever the answer to male and female, the organizing principle of true alphaness seems to be Chance's attention structure and the satisfaction of following. And we are presented with a criterion for social failure. We may think, for example, of all those vertebrate societies in which, with the few exceptions I noted in an earlier chapter, an opportunity to rise to alpha is available to all males. Now, the stability of animal social orders, in contrast to human, is a characteristic almost as universal. Jockeying for rank goes on, along with occasional exchanges, but almost nothing resembling human revolution takes place. In the past we should have dismissed this as a simple difference between animals and men. But is the dismissal valid? In a society of truly equal opportunity, likelihood dictates that the best-qualified alpha afforded by the group will be the animal to assume the role. He will indeed be the animal of most powerful charisma, the one with the broadest capacity to induce a following response in the entire group. Stability is the consequence.

But now let us think of human societies, with their built-in guarantees of inequality of opportunity. The true alpha may rise; or he may remain in the shadows of anonymity. And in his place may appear the pseudo-alpha lacking any reliable capacity for inducing a following response. He has gained his authority,,he must maintain his authority, and to secure social stability he must exert his authority through intrigue and power alone. And no road to ruin lies so open as when authority and alphaness fail to coincide.

It is a thesis which I shall return to in my next chapter, when we turn to the omega, and in particular to the pain of being young. But before we become deafened by the yells from below, let us assure ourselves that the alpha fish has the value to man which evolution proposes.

Contemporary studies of primates in the wild began in Japan in the early 1950's, though western science knew little about it. Observations were published in Japanese. The few translated papers to penetrate the language barrier attracted small attention. Japanese science was so far ahead of the scientific world-clock that monkeys and apes had not yet become fashionable. But when ten years later primate behavior, like some animated mini-skirt, suddenly arrested the attention of western science and public alike, the Japanese Monkey Center found itself with a streetful of beauties. It possesses today the longest, most complete, most systematic histories of wild primates to be found anywhere on earth. The Japanese monkey Macaco, fuscata is closely related to India's rhesus. Like the rhesus, it lives in large, highly organized troops, spends most of its time on the ground, and adapts itself to a variety of environments from Japan's cold, snowy north to the sub-tropical south. Unlike the rhesus, it has a pink face and a stubby tail. Systematic study might be said to have begun on a warm little islet called Koshima, when in the summer of 195a two scientists, Junichiro Itani and Masao Kawai, found that they could induce a troop of seventy-odd monkeys to eat sweet potatoes. While in all other ways the group retained its wild patterns, it reported regularly for the sweet-potato ration and so individuals became familiar and relationships subject to study.

"Provisioning" became the basis for Japanese technique. The following year the two Kyoto University scientists introduced provisioning to the largest troop of monkeys in Japan. They lived on a forest-clothed mountain, Takasakiyama, above the Pacific, and came down to the feeding station near a temple group. By the time Carpenter visited Takasakiyama in 1966, visitors paying admission to watch the show numbered 150,000 a year. Yet the monkeys remained wild. And by then Japanese science had accumulated not only the case histories of hundreds of individuals, but family trees as well. By the single artifice of provisioning, the Japanese made possible the study of individuality in otherwise natural groups. Thus a record of revolution was made possible.

I have mentioned how infrequently animal social orders are upset by revolution from below. And perhaps the Takasakiyama revolution of 1959 was in part a consequence of provisioning and undue population growth. By that time the colony had reached an improbable primate number of 700. Its structure was orderly, grouped in two concentric circles. In the center were six high alpha males, each with subtle rank but, like the baboon oligarchy, cooperative, acting in concert and without quarrels. With them were the females and infants, along with older but immature females. One portion of alpha responsibility was breaking up quarrels among them, the other that of keeping young males out of the inner circle. The outer circle, their province, was dominated by ten younger sub-leaders, each, like the high alphas, with subtle individual rank. The elaborate structure kept social order, and reduced fighting to a minimum. But by 1958 Itani was reporting growing stress. The next year the explosion occurred.

The highest central alpha was called Jupiter. And one day he was attacked by a high young peripheral alpha named Hoshi. It was the success of the outrageous attack, one must assume, that demoralized the social order, and the next day Hoshi and 250 followers were gone to establish a new troop. Now the latent territoriality of the Japanese monkey was demonstrated. Previously there had been the one colony. With two in the area, a frontier was established, and border war for a while was continual. Hoshi, we might say, had sufficient charisma to attract the following response of over a third of the group. But old Jupiter, despite his defeat, retained the loyalty of most of the original group until his death a few years later. Shortly thereafter the still growing group split again, so that now there are three troops on the green slopes of Takasaki-yama, each with its exclusive territory. When Carpenter made his visit, however, relations had settled down. Territorial belligerence had been reduced for the most part to ritual. An aggressive male would climb a "shaking-tree," there to rattle its branches in a clenched-fist gesture of warning and defiance.

It has been in the area of social learning that the Japanese have made their most spectacular contributions. I have suggested that learning, a prime function of society, makes the superior capacity of an individual available to all. When sweet-potato feeding was begun on the little islet of Koshima, there was a female only eighteen months old who bore no visible sign of formidable IQ. Not too far from where the sweet potatoes were normally dropped on the beach, a little stream crossed the sand into the sea. And quite shortly the girl monkey was taking her sweet potatoes to the stream and carefully washing them of sand before eating. By now Syunzo Kawamura was the observer. And before long a male of her own age was doing it too. Then her mother learned. Slowly the new cultural institution spread, and Kawamura kept his records. But the invention never reached those older males who had no attachment to the young.

This remarkable observation naturally gave the scientists ideas. It occurred to Itani to introduce a new food to his Takasakiyama colony, then still a single troop. He chose caramels. Slowly the strange food caught on, spreading just as the potato-washing had spread. The young were the experimenters, mothers and other young followed, and new infants learned from their sophisticated mothers. Again, no adult or sub-adult lacking contact with young ever acquired a taste for caramels. And in the meantime Kawamura was trying another novel food, wheat, with startling consequences.

The Japanese were beginning to believe that they had found among the young the normal course for the spreading of a cultural innovation. Kawamura was from Osaka University, and near Osaka is a ravine called Minoo. Here two troops of monkeys had their traditional territories; Kawamura chose the second of the troops for the wheat experiment. And in the Minoo-B troop all conclusions were challenged. Here the highest-ranking male -- the supreme alpha fish -- immediately started eating wheat, followed promptly by the alpha female. And whereas Itani's caramels had taken a year and a half to spread to half of the Takasakiyama troop, in Minoo-B all were eating wheat in just four hours.

Wheat for the original Kashima potato-washers followed the normal course, but it too produced a stunning event. The wheat was scattered on the beach, and the monkeys patiently picked out grains from the sand. But the same little female genius, Imq, who at eighteen months had started the sweet-potato washing and was now four years old had small patience for the process. She scooped up her wheat, sand and all, and, applying the best practices of placer-mining, went to the stream, where she let the current wash the sand away between her fingers. When Carpenter visited the island in 1966, she was an old monkey, but she was still washing sand from her wheat, as was many another who had learned from her. And perhaps new innovation was in process. Young monkeys were going downstream to catch those floating grains that escaped her fingers.

That the lowly Japanese monkey makes the lauded chimpanzee seem a dolt has perhaps its rationale. Once in conversation in London, Kenneth Oakley made a suggestion which I have never seen developed in the literature. Oakley is keeper of anthropology at the British Museum, and with Bernard Campbell of Cambridge is our foremost authority on fossil man. We were discussing the critical importance which physical anthropologists attach to brain size in relation to human evolution, and Oakley was discounting its significance. In social animals, as he saw it, intelligence must be measured in terms of social organization and communication. If Neanderthal man -- frequently with a brain larger than his successor, ourselves -- failed and became extinct, then one should look to defective social organization for an answer. Brain-power represents, in other words, not just the effective organization of your nine billion cells (if you are a human being) but the effective flow of cerebral resource within that community of which you are a part. If that community is divided, heedless of organization, incapable of communication, then the power of the individual brain can no longer be measured in terms of neurological resource.

The success of the Japanese monkey lies not in his unremarkable brain but in his remarkable talent for society. He submits himself to authority, but is capable of revolution when things get too thick. Despite the rigidity of hierarchy, still equality of vertebrate opportunity is such that a superior but immature female -- about as close as one can get to the ultimate omega -- can make her contribution to the total brain power of present and future Japanese monkeys. That the flow of learning is incomplete and does not reach unconcerned adults is of no significance if we think in terms of future generations.

What is of significance to any present generation, and what must be regarded as the supreme discovery of the Japanese scientists so far, is the spectacular spread of social learning when innovation and alphaness coincide. The omegas of Taka-sakiyama took eighteen months to spread a taste for caramels to 51 percent of the troop; the alphas of Minoo-B took four hours to establish a taste for wheat in toto. If we continued to think of alphaness in terms of strength, might, despotism, then the consequence would be inexplicable. But if we see it in terms of Chance's "attention structure," or of the following response, then the value of the alpha to every social member becomes apparent. The omega commands the attention only of his or her intimates. The true alpha holds the attention of the entire group, and through giant magnetism accomplishes as a normal event what would otherwise be a miracle.

We need not labor long in the human vineyard to gather our tasteful or tasteless fruit. The power of fashion demands no comment other than that man did not think it up. The dazzling gift to a wartime Britain of a Winston Churchill, the sickening tragedy in a peacetime America of a John F. Kennedy, speak of the value of the alpha to every last omega. High alphaness is rare, and we know it when such alphas are gone. But Adolf Hitler was an undoubted alpha.

Neither reader nor author is yet in a position to judge facts of social life when we have only begun to accumulate them. I myself am grateful indeed to the scientist in a ravine just outside Osaka who made a contribution of such significance; but I do not even know his first name. Kawamura placed him in charge of the Minoo-B experiment, and his name was Ya-mada, and his paper has never, to my knowledge, been translated from the Japanese. One may read about it, however, in Kawamura's contribution to Charles H. Southwick's valuable and available Primate Social Behavior. And one may reflect that it is out of such anonymous dedications on far distant fields that the sciences are bringing us evidences of man.

In the spring of 1967 I was starting a tour of lectures at Pennsylvania State University, and Carpenter and I had the pleasure and peace of the Easter weekend at his spreading house in the nearby woodlands. We were chin-deep in the films and the photographs that he had taken of Japanese monkeys the previous summer, but somehow we turned to speculation concerning the life of a monkey in a society of 700. And the psychologist Carpenter made a memorable analysis of monkey decision-making.

"You are a monkey," he said, "and you're running along a path past a rock and unexpectedly meet face to face another animal. Now, before you know whether to attack it, to flee it, or to ignore it, you must make a series of decisions. Is it monkey or non-monkey? If non-monkey, is it pro-monkey or anti-monkey? If monkey, is it male or female? If female, is she interested? If male, is it adult or juvenile? If adult, is it of my group or some other? If it is of my group, then what is its rank, above or below me? You have about one fifth of a second to make all these decisions, or you.could be attacked."

I have never encountered a more eloquent, more realistic, or more humbling tribute to the capacities of the animal mind. In any social group that includes rank order as its structure, every animal must know every other animal individually, and be aware of himself at the focus of the varying relationships. Thus, through social ranking, natural selection places a premium on intelligence, for the animal too stupid to meet the competition of Carpenter's decision-making process will probably be eliminated as a breeding factor in the group.

To the successful organization of unequal beings in confrontation with common needs, hierarchy makes many a contribution. It reduces fighting. Once the order of dominance is established, serious aggression becomes rare, since each member knows too well his own capacities in relation to the next fellow's. Rank order sorts through competition the unequals, placing in positions of influence those with superior assets for the group as a whole. Then, through social learning and the following response, it makes their achievements available to become individual assets of every last member. There are genetic consequences as well, since in most species the sexual attractiveness of high rank and unattractiveness of low favors a disproportionate contribution to the gene pool on the part of the highly endowed. Hierarchy even disposes, in the strangest of ways, an animal justice, and we shall look at that in a moment, gut perhaps the most significant contribution to the species as a whole, and to evolution in its long upward sweep, has been the demand placed by status on intelligence.

When Konrad Lorenz bred his first flock of jackdaws -- this was back in 1927 at his old home in Austria -- one of his first impressions was how young they are when each recognizes all others individually. Jackdaws pair in the first springtime after they are hatched, and do not mate for another year. But long even before the pairing, the young males have completed their shuffling, their pecking, their crowding, their staring each other down, and have established the recognized rank which they will probably occupy for the rest of their lives. The females recognize it too, for with the pairing each assumes the rank of her male, and knows which other females she must defer to and which she may push about. And while Lorenz' first flock was small, only fourteen birds, what he found has been confirmed a thousand times over and in far larger groups.

Noble wrote of social rank's uncanny eye for detail. And such must be the animal eye that so quickly assembles its social register. Dairy cows have their butting orders, and will follow them with 95 percent consistency. The sea otter would seem to challenge the eye for detail, since most of the animal is under water. But when a herd of one hundred was carefully observed for a season off the California coast, a remarkable order was revealed. Otters -- sea-going baboons in the sense of their talents for banditry -- steal food from one another. But each knows whom he can steal from, whom he cannot. Sea-otter rank may be described as no-steal-back.

Glen McBride, of the University of Queensland, has made many observations of chickens valuable to Australian poultry-growers, no doubt, but as valuable to us. Any society based on rank order, he concluded, must have a maximum number reflecting the animal's capacity to discriminate between individuals. With hens the number is about fifty. The flock that is increased in size will suffer disorder and increased aggression through declining social control. Wild species may differ in this particular evidence of animal IQ, and,other factors such as food supply may limit the social number. But a final limitation must be one of intelligence. Thus, baboon troops in East Africa average forty or fifty in number. But in Mozambique's Goron-gosa reserve, with its abundant food supply, I have seen thoroughly integrated troops running over two hundred. Baboon intelligence is equal to such identification.

In a way, McBride's concept of the limits of individual identification supports Altmann's definition of the social border as that line where communication ceases to be effective. Altmann's is a broader concept since it will apply to any group, such as the starling flock, that responds to the same alarm signal, whereas McBride's refers only to groups with a structure of organized social order. But the problem remains that of communication. The alpha can release the group's following response only so far as members can identify with him as individuals. And he can exercise his responsibilities only so far as he can identify his subordinates.

Alpha responsibility is difficult to comprehend, for in many species it is as if the alpha, in exchange for his privileges, assumes definite obligations. Again let us return to Lorenz, since he was the first to make broad observations of social behavior. When he had bred his second flock of jackdaws, he found himself with a large mixed flock of older and younger birds. One day a huge flock of migrating jackdaws and rooks settled in an adjoining meadow, and all of his younger birds flew immediately to join it. His consternation was painful, for it seemed to him certain that when the big flock moved on, his young ones would follow, and he had no way to retrieve them. But he had not given proper estimate to the responsibility or the resources of his high-ranking older birds. They had stayed aloof from the excitements of the visitors. Now they flew out, selected one by one their young fellows from the hundreds in the meadow (Lorenz' eye could not identify them), and by swooping low induced a following response and led them home. Lorenz lost only two birds.

Defense of the group is an alpha commonplace. I have mentioned the gang at the top of the baboon troop that with any alarm signal goes immediately to meet the enemy. In a famous experiment with a captive group of rhesus monkeys at Calcutta, Southwick introduced every variety of stranger. All were attacked, but when juveniles were introduced, 70 percent of the attacks were by juveniles. The alpha remained aloof. When females were introduced, almost all the attacks were made by females; two strange introduced males were attacked both by the beta male and the females. Through all, the alpha avoided the commotion. But when a human handler entered to net a monkey, he was instantly and viciously attacked by the alpha. Southwick concluded that it was external threat to the group that roused the leader.

Hall's observations of the patas monkey in Uganda suggested that the alpha's function was almost entirely that of sentinel and guard. The patas male is large, so conspicuously colored that he is sometimes called the hussar monkey, and, living a terrestrial life on the savannas, is the fastest-running of all primates. He lives in a one-male group with half a dozen or more drab females and their young. So intent is he at scanning the savanna for danger that actual movements of the group are usually led by a female. But if danger appears, his defense is remarkable. Once Hall surprised a group. To his own surprise, the male at blinding speed ran directly at him so that Hall thought he was being attacked. At the last moment the male veered off, while the human intruder, still in shock, looked after him. Then Hall looked about for females. While the male had conducted his diversion, they had vanished into the savanna.

If in a prairie-dog town in the American plains a subordinate gets into an argument with a member of an adjoining clan, the alpha will drive him away and take over the fight. When Scottish red deer are disturbed, any may give the first alert, but after that only the alpha hind. And when the party withdraws she will be the rear guard. I have watched the same action in South Africa's Kruger Park when, coming late into camp, I was halted by a party of frightened kudu breaking across the road and vanishing into the dusky bush. Like red deer, the bulls of this superb antelope species live off on their own while mothers and young form their own party. For moments after the cows and their young had disappeared in the bush, a last female -- one may safely presume, the alpha -- remained at the road's edge, peering back into the dark for the possible lion while she snorted warnings to her now-distant company.

Social defense is not always the obligation of the alphas, but, as in the Japanese monkey, may involve a fighting class of younger peripheral males. We cannot know: they may be merely redirecting their aggressions. But what I have referred to as animal justice is invariably the duty of high-ranking males. And its administration is surprisingly simple.

There are times when anthropomorphisms are almost irresistible to even the most rigorous of scientists. As unlikely victims as Niko Tinbergen and David Lack have found the word "righteous" inescapable when describing the behavior of a territorial proprietor threatened by an intruder. So the adjective "aristocratic" is most difficult to avoid if students are to give any clear impression of the alpha. He holds himself aloof, as did Southwick's rhesus. He may bicker with his beta, but, like Lorenz' alpha jackdaw, he will avoid discussion with all those farther down the rank. He will bicker with nobody if he belongs to the baboon oligarchy. The gorilla silverback, despite his'monopoly of power, will look on with indifference while a subordinate copulates nearby. So will the alpha vervet and the dominant bull elk; the male lion will go to sleep while his brother-in-alphaness handles the situation. The rhesus or Japanese alpha male moves like royalty while deference clears a space about him. Altmann and Chance measured that space in both the wild and captive rhesus and found it the same, eight feet.

The aristocrat stays apart from hoi-polloi and avoids all unseemly actions. But as in most species he has a responsibility for defense, so in many he has an obligation for order. If a fight breaks out among the rank-and-file, he will leap in to break it up. And, breaking it up, he sides inevitably with the weaker. So must it be with the rooster bringing peace to his quarreling hens, or the ugliest of baboons putting a juvenile bully in his place.

Perhaps there is no mystery about animal justice, strange though the phrase may sound. Presidents and kings appeal to the people in their struggles with the barons. Fathers must defend their most intolerable children if the family is to be saved. When order is essential to the survival of beings, then alpha and omega must make compromises, however distasteful; concede sacrifices, however repugnant; make communication, however boring; accept risks, however dangerous; seal alliances, however temporary. Animals, in part because instinct allows no real choice, in part because intelligence is unclouded by false instruction, succeed. But man -- suspended between dicta three billion years old and a foresight nouveau riche, swinging between wisdoms of most ancient origin and a power of both learning and ignorance -- here is the animal of doubtful future.