Endless Thread - The Alpha Male Myth

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

In 1970, a young biologist named David Mech published what could be the most consequential book on wolves ever written. At the time, The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, was the most complete collection of scientific knowledge on wolves money could buy, and it became best seller for Dave's publishers. But outside of the world of wolf biology, the book is also credited with unleashing a certain idea into our popular lexicon: The Alpha. The thing is, Dave made a mistake – and the alpha wolf, doesn't exist. This week on Endless Thread, Ben and Amory track down the origins of "the alpha," and whether this idea – which has been recanted by the very scientist who popularized it – has any legitimacy when talking about people. Show notes: The Myth of the Alpha Wolf (The New Yorker)* Do alpha males even exist? (The Guardian) Elon Musk Shares Theory That Only ‘Alpha Males’ Should Vote (Newsweek) This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Okay, today we're going to be talking about a story we have been working on for what feels like a dog's age, or maybe we should say wolf's age, Amory? Yes, maybe we should, because this story begins with wolves. Specifically, a book about wolves called The Wolf, the Ecology and Behavior of an

endangered species. You could even say it's the book about wolves. You could say that because the wolf, which is by biologist David Meach, might just be the most consequential book on wolves ever written, but not for the reasons you might think. When it was published in 1970, the wolf was the most complete collection of scientific knowledge about wolves you could buy. But today, it is also credited with unleashing a certain idea. into our popular lexicon. How would I describe myself? Three words.

Hardworking, alpha male, jackhammer. In the information aid, Sheldon, you and I are the alpha males. Who's the alpha? You're looking at him, kid. Today, when talking about human beings, we know that alpha male usually means the guy at the top of the food chain. In theory, he's confident, competitive, capable, and successful with the ladies. In the manosphere, alpha status is an aspirational goal.

Otherwise, you're being a beta who's weak, unattractive, submissive, and lacks the traits of real manhood. Well, I think an alpha male is a man that other men want to be. And I think a beta male is that is a man that other men are not trying to emulate in any degree, right? That was Andrew Tate on the Dean show in 2022 before he was charged with human trafficking among other alleged crimes. For others, the alpha male is an emblem of toxic masculinity that has seeped into our lives far beyond the internet, notably into our political discourse. Like in 2024, when Elon Musk reposted a theory on X saying only alphas are capable of making good decisions and should be the only people to participate in democracy. Woof. Also, President Donald Trump has frequently been to be.

described as an alpha by his supporters. So you might be wondering, what does all of this have to do with a book about wolves published in the 70s? Well, in Dave Meach's book, he uses the term alpha to describe the animal at the top of wolf's social hierarchies. There's a theory that this is what popularize the idea of the alpha male as we know it. Except here's the thing. Dave got it wrong. And I thought, wait a minute. Why am I calling this thing the alpha male? I'm Ben High Value Alpha Johnson. I'm Amory Wolf, Sievertson.

Today on Endless Thread, the Alpha Male myth. To get to the bottom of this whole Alpha Male mix-up, we had to go back to the source. When did your wolf love affair begin, Dave? Well, I began working with wolves in 1958. So, we tracked down Dave. Meach, the author of the book that started it all. These days, Dave is a senior research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey out of the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. But decades ago, he was a young Ph.D. candidate, observing wolf populations by airplane over Isle Royale in Lake Superior.

I can't help but remember the first time I saw the wolves from the aircraft and saw this large pack of 15 out of on the ice, just seeing those for the first time from the aircraft was really quite a moment. But I had no idea which members were the young ones, which were the old ones, which were the dominant ones. I couldn't even tell one from the other from the era. So it might just well be ants tracking around. Very little was known about wolves at the time. I was there to learn anything I could about them, actually.

The first thing that Dave will tell you about wolves is that they are incredibly. shy creatures. They're so scared of humans, it can be almost impossible to get close enough to study them in the wild. And in the 1960s, scientists were only just starting to use technology like radio collars to track wildlife. Hence, the aircraft. So at that time, a lot of what scientists knew about wolf behavior came from studying them up close in captivity. When Dave was starting out, one of the most comprehensive studies on wolf behavior available. was a paper published in the 1940s by a Swiss researcher named Rudolf Schenkel. Schenkel was an animal behaviorist. Science knew at the time that wolves lived in packs,

but we had no idea what a pack was other than a group of wolves. So he thought he'd like to study wolves in a pack. And so he needed a lot of wolves to do that. So he just went and recruited wolves from various zoos and put them all together in a colony and figured that was a wolf pack. Then Shankle waited and watched and documented what happened next. Probably you know of and most people have heard of the pecking order in chickens. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's a dominance hierarchy. And I think everybody learns that in some biology class or something.

It turns out that many animals. if you put a bunch of random individuals of the same species together in captivity, they do tend to form a pecking order or a dominance hierarchy. And that's what these wolves did. There were two hierarchies, one for the males and one for the females. That's just the way the wolves in that group happened to sort themselves out. And that's what Schenkel described. Schenkel's wolves fought it out to establish their pecking order.

In the end, the pack was led by a male and female wolf, both of which fought their way to that position. And they were called the Alphas. Fast forward now to the 1960s. Dave has been studying Wolves for about a decade, and he's getting ready to publish his epic book. And as he's compiling his research, he includes Shankill's findings and the concept of the Alpha. Well, I didn't know any better. I put the first radio caller out in 1968, and I was getting a little better idea at that time of what a wolf pack was, but that's just about the time I was finishing up writing the book. So when I put information from Schenkel into the book, I really didn't know much more about the wolf's social hierarchy than he did.

Dave's book, The Wolf, comes out, and it becomes a bestseller. He goes on with his life and his career studying wolves in the wild. And he hears about a place where you could live right next to wolves and study them up close. I spent 24 summers on Ellesmere Island and up near the North Pole where wolves are tame. What Dave means by tame is that on Elsmere Island, wolves have had very little contact with humans. So they never learned to be afraid of us. When Dave and his fellow researchers came by to observe them, the wolves figured that these hairless apes who kept their distance, watched, and took notes were pretty chill, if a little weird, maybe.

I could live right with them and just day after day be with them and saw what they did up close, that kind of thing. And it was during one of those summers, roughly around the late 1990s, that it started dawning on me that what Schenkel had found. was not really validly applicable to what I was seeing in the wild. So, Dave, what is the truth about wolves in terms of a power structure? Well, their social structure is very much like a human family. A wolf pack, we found out, is a family that is a pair of wolves and their offspring. So the way it forms is a maturing male from one pack and a maturing female from another pack. Leave those packs and go off and strike on their own, try to find a mate and a place where there's no other wolves,

and settle down. They pair bond, produce pups, and start their own pack, just like a human family does. In fact, anthropologists consider the wolf pack a better animal. analog for a human family than our most primates. In my notes, I had been writing, the alpha male did this, the alpha male did that. And I thought, wait a minute, why am I calling this thing the alpha male? You call an animal an alpha if it fights to get to the top. And this animal didn't have to do that. So that's when I decided, whoa, I better correct this. This is a super nice, chill scientist's way. of describing a kind of gobsmacking or at least forehead-slapping problem.

The concept of the alpha male that Schenkel had observed almost 50 years ago at this point and that Dave had used in his best-selling book was incorrect. In 1999, Dave published a paper called Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolfpacks, which was supposed to act as a correction to his book. In it, he discusses the revelation that Wolfpacks in the wild are not high-house. hierarchical in some intense way. They're just family units. Shankle wasn't totally wrong about what he was seeing in his own study.

The wolves in his captive wolf pack did fight amongst themselves for dominance. But those animals weren't to family. They were a bunch of random wolves from different zoos that had to figure out how to live with one another. And so they weren't representative of a natural pack led by a mom and pop wolf in the wild. But by then, Dave's original book had been in print for almost three decades. And it's not so easy to take back an idea. The concept of the alpha male as a default biological fact of animal behavior, including inhumans, had taken on a life of its own.

But the only way you're going to be able to truly reach your potential is if you conquer your inner alpha. What will happen is women would naturally allow him to take the lead. They were naturally submit to him. When you're an alpha male, and you're against other alpha males, and we eat their own. Alpha males eat their own. Do you think your book popularized the term?

You know, I have to do a lot of interviews about this subject, and someone had put together a graph of some sort showing that starting around the early 70s, that the term started becoming more in common parlance. And so there seems to be a correlation, between when my book was published and an increase in the use of the term. But as you know, correlation is not necessarily causation. So we can't really say whether that book had anything to do with it or not.

That's a classic scientist's answer right there, Dave. Dave asked his publishers to stop printing new copies to avoid the spread of misinformation. But no dice. Why wouldn't the publisher stop? Oh, the book was selling so well. It would take years for anything to be done about it. But we'll come back to that. At this point, we can clearly establish that there is no such thing as an alpha male

when it comes to wolves living naturally in the wild. But does that make it wrong to use this term for humans? We asked Dave what he thought. Of course, Dave's a wolf guy. He doesn't claim expertise beyond that. However... There's no question there are dominance hierarchies, right? not just in humans, but in many other species.

So there is a biological basis for it. In chickens, if nothing else, what do we consider forcing oneself to the top? Does it always have to be a physical fight? And I think what's been happening in society is that we've seen a lot of cases where some prominent people have a certain, themselves more vigorously than others and have, by doing that, actually have gotten to the top.

And whether it's valid to call them alphas is not up to me. But I could see where some folks might want to do that. And I wouldn't refute it. Dave told us if we wanted to learn more about alpha male behavior in people, we could try reaching out to a primatologist. After the break, we trace the origins of human alpha males down our evolutionary family tree. A familiar place for the next topic, less of a... At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories.

Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew.

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in guerrilla society. We tend to use the term dominant male more often, although you will see Alpha Silverback on occasion. And in chimps, I think alpha male is used a lot more frequently. Dr. Tara Stoinsky has possibly the coolest job. She's the CEO and chief scientific officer of the Diane Fosse Gorilla Fund in Atlanta, Georgia. But she spends a lot of her time with gorillas in Rwanda. I am trained as a primatologist and have been studying guerrilla. now for about 30 years. And my particular interest has traditionally been in male guerrilla, social dynamics, and reproductive strategies.

So, you know, male gorillas are the largest primate on the planet, weighing in at 400 pounds. They possess this incredible size and strength, but also this very gentle nature as well. Gorillas are one of the five species that help make up the great apes, our closest living relatives on planet Earth. The great apes include orangutans. gorillas, chimps, and bonobos. They also include... What's up, bro?

You and me, baby. Humans. Woo! Chimps and gorillas share around 98% of our DNA. All the apes are highly intelligent. Chimps are known to be great tool users. They use a lot of political maneuvering in their social structure. Gorillas are so strong and have such a unique sort of ecological niche that they aren't great tool users,

at least not in the wild. In captivity, they can use tools quite well. But as a result of that, there's kind of this joke that gorillas aren't as smart as chimps. But we know that really not to be the case. They just show their intelligence in different ways. Spoken like a true guerrilla researcher. Exactly. While we might not always call them the alpha, chimp and gorilla societies do tend to be led by a dominant male. Their dominance-based social hierarchy is much. closer to the model that the animal behaviorist Rudolph Shankle observed in his captive wolf pack.

But turns out that the traits of an alpha male ape aren't as clear cut as the ultra-manly alpha male we know in popular culture. There is a dominant side to it of being a leader of physical size or maybe aggression sometimes. But size and aggression aren't everything. I think in the animal world, It's a lot more about social connectivity. It's about politics. It's about not just relying on your strength, but also relying on your social skills and being a statesman in a lot of ways, both in chimp and guerrilla society. Which primate species do you think is most similar to us? I will say one of the things I find funny is sometimes when we're talking about gorillas, you know, I've had people say to me, wait, can we stop for a second?

Are we talking about gorillas right now? Are we talking about people? But in general, I think chimps are a good representation of the more aggressive side of human nature. Chimps are very territorial and will actually go to war with neighboring families of chimpanzees, whereas guerrillas stay in touch with other families. They even have family reunions sometimes when all the guerrilla cousins can play together again. We do see, you know, these kind of multi-level society. where these guerrilla families that will split

can come back together. And unlike chimps, where that might be really aggressive, here they can come back together. Kids can play. Individuals can interact. We see these relationships. They can be maintained over a decade or more. So I think elements of the more peaceful side of human nature,

we're learning more that that's reflected in gorillas. On this day, the year of our Lord that we were talking to you, what is, you know, what resonates the most with you in terms of the comparison to humans? In this moment in time, I think chimps, unfortunately, I'm seeing less of our guerrilla side at this moment in time, you know, both in our own country and worldwide. But so right now I think the chimps side of us is winning a little bit, you know, not as much collaboration, not as much coming together, maybe a little bit more separation and focus. on differences rather than similarities.

Yeah. This is kind of a fun game to play with oneself. Like, am I having a gorilla day or a chimp day or a bonobo day? That's great. I haven't thought about that. I'm going to do that in the morning now when I wake up. I'll say, I want to have a gorilla day, and then I'll assess at the end of the day what I actually was successful in doing. There you go.

There you go. But despite everything we have in common with our great ape relatives, there is one really big difference between us and them. which is that over the course of millennia of human history, we've come to organize our societies in a very different way. And it's a lot more complicated than just simple biology. How do you define masculinity? I don't. I don't.

This is Matthew Gutman. He's a cultural anthropologist and professor emeritus at Brown University. He has spent his career studying what it means to be a man in cultures across the globe. Go out and interview 10 people. You're going to get 10 different definitions of what masculinity means for them. That's what is of interest to me. Matthew points out that when it comes to attributing certain behaviors to our biological

sex, we seem more willing to explain away the behaviors of men. What do you expect? He's a guy. Of course he's going to do that. We don't say, of course, she's a woman. Obviously, people do say that. But it's much more criticized and right. rightly so. I think we need to criticize it more when we make these sweeping generalizations

about guys. This is saying there are things that they cannot control. And so I would argue there has been more criticism, fortunately, of attributing things naturally to women's bodies. But I think we still continue to do it a lot with guys' bodies. Matthew argues that as a species, we have a vast repertoire of behaviors that allow us to coexist in societies. We make decisions about how to treat one another based on laws and morals that we came up with ourselves, not just biological or instinctual urges that we can't help but succumb to. This is something that ultimately sets us apart from our animal kingdom family members. Let's go back to Dave, the wolf researcher who was trying to get his publisher to stop

making copies of his book and fix his alpha male legacy. I couldn't even get it stopped for the publishers to stop publishing it until two years ago. So that book was in print for 52 years. And that misinformation was being out there. And the media people were looking at it. And so, and, you know, science had been using that term for quite a while. I knew it was our fault, Dave. So where does this leave us?

with the whole alpha male concept, as it does or doesn't pertain to humans. This reminds me a bit of a meme that started this whole thing and that led to the pitch from our producer on this episode, Frannie Monaghan. And without describing it in great detail, I'll just say there's really a group of memes that now feature a photo of Dave Meach, a very normal-looking mustachioed guy in a parka who does science. And this group of memes really serves to remind the extremely, online that there's this guy who studied wolves once and referenced this idea of the alpha, and that may be the origin of this kind of mess that we are in when it comes to ideas about

masculinity and power and leadership. Humans are animals formed by millennia of nature, right? And we're also, at least in our minds, special and different from the animal world. So reducing things to simplistic structures like the alpha or top dog is a pretty simplistic non-scientific concept and way of thinking of things. And I think there's a way to both recognize things that seem within our nature and also recognize those things in our nature are absolutely changeable. And society doesn't coalesce around our instincts, like society and civilization and the way that we interact with each other

is really what we make of it. Yeah, I mean, biologically, I just want to kind of be like taking a little nap in a tree. And instead, I'm working this job. So what's up with that? You know what I mean? And also just that we associate the term alpha with being the leader, when in reality, there are so many different ways to kind of like lead a group and guide a group and be a positive influence and, you know, member of that group. I've worked with all different kinds of leaders.

And, you know, alphas are great, but like, they're not always the best. kind of leaders, right? Give me a beta with a good sense of humor any day. Yeah, right? Come on. Endless Threat is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Frannie Monaghan. It's co-hosted by me, Amory Severson, and...

Oh, Ben Brock Johnson, mix and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vikas. The rest of our team is Grace Tatter, Dean Russell, Emily Jenkowski, and our managing producer, Sumitajoshi. Endless Threat is a show about... the clear lines between wolves in captivity and wild ones. If you have an untold history and unsolved mystery and another story from the internet, you want us to tell, you can hit us up, endless thread at wbUR.org. Awo!