respectorcist | CAN'T TAG, MUST PARTICLE PHYSICS

Dear professional and amateur writers who like to portray wolves/werewolves/wolf-like things as living in dominance/submissive dichotomy with an alpha and a strict hierarchy:

Please stop already.

The study this model was based on was found to be severely lacking by modern ethologists and was performed with wolves in captivity. All modern findings are that wolves don't live in packs but in nuclear families where pecking order is based on birth order and children follow the example of the parental breeding pair. A larger group of wolves may engage in a shared activity, but once the activity is accomplished or severely stymied, the group collapses.

The 'alpha' is a myth.

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Dear any human being who puts any credence in the tribal alpha-male narrative;

The 'alpha' is a myth.

Modern anthropologists believe that there is a mountain of evidence which supports not this supposition but the idea that humans evolved in largely egalitarian bands that punished attempts of dominance with social sanctioning, banishment, and death.

Also, fuck you.

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I really wish people would stop glorifying, romanticizing, or even justifying this bull caca, even fictionally. Because it is just not logically justifiable. Traits that would confer significant reproductive advantage would tend to spread through a population rapidly, so that those traits that consistently produce more varying results among a species are probably not under significant selection pressures. If being the vaunted alpha-male was the ne plus ultra of reproductive strategies, there would be a shit-ton less of these supposed beta personalities around.

I AM JUST SAYIN

In better, or perhaps more relevant and less ANGERS news, CURRENT EVENTS:

"Positive identification of the new particle’s characteristics will take considerable time and data.
But whatever form the Higgs particle takes, our knowledge of the
fundamental structure of matter is about to take a major step forward."

(actually, ykw, this angers me too. because it reminds me of a discussion i once had with

di about how the death of nasa's manned space program does not equal the death of ~dreams~ for american children and therefore their desire to excel in the sciences. they can keep dreaming. they can be physicists or ecologists. the problem is that parents don't think these are what i like to call 'big, sexy' jobs and that american parents are the death of dreams for american children.)

FML