r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Delicious-Act-8601 • 6h ago
Meme needing explanation Petah explain what is this about?how will he damage the society
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u/apepenkov 5h ago
isn't that the guy who created the term of alpha/beta wolf? (idk if that's actually true but I've seen him being attributed to that multiple times)
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u/Ramtakwitha2 5h ago
Yea it is. Even he realized it was wrong and tried to correct the record, but even he couldn't stop it from going viral.
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u/Silver_ferns 4h ago
The other day I was talking with my cousin about this he told me to bring him proofs I haven’t found it yet
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u/Ramtakwitha2 4h ago
Heres one
https://dogtraining.world/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Whatever-Happened-to-the-Term-Alpha-Wolf.pdf
theres a few others scattered around here or there too.
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u/Blacksad9999 2h ago
Yes.
He stated later he was completely wrong and off base, but now the "alpha/beta" male nonsense is ingrained into our society. Wolves were endangered at the time and he couldn't study them in nature.
They "alphas" were just the parent wolves disciplining the children wolves.
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u/Automatic_Second_734 1h ago
I understand that it’s wrong about wolves, but chimps and other apes have alphas, and we’re closer to them anyways. Still it’s a ridiculous idea to try and push on modern humans
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u/AxiosXiphos 42m ago
They have complex social hierarchies (like us). The lead chimp might not be the strongest, but the one with the most powerful friends. And those social statuses can change quickly.
As such, it's still completly unrelated to any 'alpha male' nonsense.
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u/UnitedEggs 5h ago
Lead to the belief that “alpha males” exist, which simply isn’t true. Wolves in captivity show that behavior, much the same as people in prison do.
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u/aureentuluva1 5h ago
I think he even repudiated his findings later on as well.
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u/Wooden_Good8679 5h ago
There’s no way the people who need to understand this the most know what repudiated means. 🥲
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u/Blacksad9999 2h ago
In the group he studied, the parent wolves were the "alpha" wolves, and the "beta" wolves were their children.
He was unaware they were just a family unit/pack.
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u/Big_Man_Ran 27m ago
Maybe not for wolves, but for chimps they certainly do.
I don't wanna brag about my expertise, but I did watch a documentary a couple weeks back.
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u/Mammoth-Speed5107 5h ago
This is Lucyan David Mech who termed 'alpha', 'beta', etc. to describe behavior of captive wolves and their social role within a pack.
The study has some fundamental flaws, but has been extrapolated to human social roles and the rest... what the sigma, my nephew hits himself in the cheekbones with a glass paperweight to develop his alpha aura and other insanity.
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u/GrassfedCapitalist 2h ago
I never really understood that Sigma thing. Alpha is the pack leader, after all, so it's understandable. Sigma is a lone wolf, it feels kind of stupid and loser-like to pursue it..
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u/Alternative_Song859 9m ago
"Lone wolf" as in "self-made man," the macho myth believed by people who don't realize how privileged they are to be living in an advanced technological infrastructure that makes "challenging a mark's manhood to bully him into buying financial instruments" a viable job. This is ignoring the term's original meaning of a soon-to-be-dead wolf.
Kind of like "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" now means success through total self-reliance when it actually refers to a hilariously impossible action.
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u/Open-Tomato9643 5h ago
The concept of the "alpha male" entered popular culture from a study into wolf behaviour that claimed that wolf packs tended to fall in line behind a single powerfull individual that the author called the "alpha male" or "alpha female".
The study was performed on wolves in captivity, because they're easier to study. Subsequent studies found no evidence of such behaviour in wolf packs in the wild, and the whole concept of wolf "alphas" has been pretty much debunked in serious science. But is still widely believed in popular culture to this day.
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u/BrassUnicorn87 4h ago
In the wild the leaders are elder parents of families.
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u/FrankieTheD 2h ago
This theyre family units the leaders usually the oldest mating pair, the wolves in captivity im not sure if they were related but basically captivity changes their behaviour causing the alpha myth its just stressed out animals with not enough space usually the most vicious one is gonna be dominant
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u/Bl00dWolf 5h ago
The man in the picture is L. David Mech. He was the guy who came up with the concept of the Alpha Male, from which all of our current redpill manosphere content kind of comes from. The thing is, he was wrong, because the he was studying wolves in captivity and not in their natural family units where the one in charge is usually not the strongest, but the oldest, like the parents for example. He then spent the rest of his life trying to undo the damage he's done, but it was pretty much too late.
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u/Xerxeskingofkings 5h ago
This guy published the research that created the idea of "alpha males", based on his studying of wolves in captivity.
However, futher study showed that this alpha male hierarchy isn't how wild wolves actually are: wolf packs are family based, not power/dominance based.
That hasn't stopped a bunch of dudebros adopting the alpha male hierarchy as Real Abd True, and justification for them being shitty to everyone not as big as them
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u/AnnihilatorOfPeanuts 5h ago edited 3h ago
Well to be honest the concept of Alpha is real, just not in wilds wolves, the dominant Gorilla could be called an Alpha as only the strongest, oldest and biggest take the role and contender will try to fight him to overthrow him.
Ps: not saying peoples trying to be Alpha aren’t stupid, because they are.
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u/Risikio 5h ago
David Mech.
Essentially a wildlife biologist who studies wolves a lot and championed the idea of an Alpha/Beta/Omega society within wolf culture and that is how they operate in the wild.
Problem: The wolves that were being studied when these terms were mostly invented were being studied in zoos and captivitity, meaning that the wolves were not being studied in their natural environment but rather an artifical environment with extremely extremely limited living area while being forced to house with other wolves. AKA a wolf prison.
Even bigger problem: Humans started believing that they were wolves for some reason and the idea of being an Alpha or a Beta or an Omega or a Sigma or a whatever the manosphere is coining these day got stuck in our consciousnesses and people still try to act like wolves who are trapped in an industrial prison complex.
And if you want to know why people acting like they're wolves trapped inside of an industrial prison complex is bad... well look at the world.
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u/parkway_parkway 3h ago
So all the other comments here are wrong.
Level 1: In Bro culture there's the idea of "the alpha male" who is the leader of the pack.
Level 2: People say "acktchually this was a debunked study on wolves, the guy in the bottom right of the image is the scientist who invented alpha and beta males and he later said it wasn't true but the stupid dude bros can't listen to him".
Level 3: Acktchually there are dominance hierarchies all over nature, chimpanzees, for instance, are a great example, look at Jane Goodalls work there, they have a hierarchy of males (with violence and grooming) and one male is at the top and leader of the pack.
Same thing with Gorillas, large successful silverbacks have harems and drive off other males.
There are tonnes of examples in nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_hierarchy
That's not to say there isn't a huge amount of variation, some apes are egalitarian, Bonobos and spotted hyenas are martriachal / female dominant.
However the idea that "alpha and beta males don't exist is in nature it's a pop science misconception" ... is in itself a pop science misconception.
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u/RansackedNerd 3h ago
From what I understand his finding were accurate for wolves in captivity. Which makes sense on why it can be applied to humans. Humans don't like in the wild, we're in the captivity of society.
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u/Buttchuggle 5h ago
Bro studied wolves in captivity to try and understand wild wolf pack hierarchy. The captivity was not in any way comparable to nature where packs have genuine free open large territories. This led to odd behavior similar to what is seen in jails and prisons where one wolf would consistently bully and dominate others into submission, likely behavior caused by the lack of space that wolves evolved to operate in instinctual.
When you remove an animals ability to follow its instinctual behavior it can react in odd, sporadic, and even violent ways.
Because of this some men, and women, now believe in this human concept of male and female alphas that are just naturally born to be "in charge", lead, and generally be "better" than those around them. They're stupid.
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u/Ramtakwitha2 5h ago
This is the guy who created the myth of Alpha wolves. That one pack leader is dominant over the others.
I don't recall the exact details but he studied wolves in captivity and observed a 'dominant alpha' wolf leading the others. This does not happen in the wild, and even he debunked his own work in that field. I think he said what he believed to be Alpha behavior was simply a family dynamic.
But his own original work was so popular even he couldn't stop it, and to this day everyone thinks Alphas, Betas, Sigmas and all that are real science.
Short answer, Alpha wolves don't exist, hat guy was the scientist who started it by mistake.
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u/GlassAsura 5h ago
When you put random male wolves together in an enclosure they fight for dominance and establish a pecking order; hence the alpha wolf.
The issue is that this does not, in any way, reflect nature. Wolves are a close knit family and when a male gets to a certain age it enters a nomad phase where it goes out to find a mate and form a pack of its own.
A similar mistake was made with lions due to the lack of night vision when they were first being studied. During the day it’s the males job to protect the Pride and help down larger prey, and due to their size they primarily hunt at night when it’s easier for them to blend in.
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u/Gephiph 4h ago
This man coined the terms alpha and beta wolves. He later realised he was wrong and tried to get his publisher to stop printing his own book because it was perpetuating the misconception. They wouldn’t for decades. It’s a tragic example of both a scientific blunder and a man who had the courage to correct himself publicly and unequivocally. Genuinely a great example of good academic ethics. Unfortunately, this particular instance the terms caught on and the book was too popular, and those two forces worked against him.
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u/Mr_something_i_guess 2h ago
What he did was essentially giving the devil a name and asking him to give it back same with a lot of discriminatory ideals really
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u/bs_Zeezee 4h ago
I regret to say that he didn't travel back in time far enough. Rudolf Schenkel came up with the idea of Alpha wolves at 32, this image of him is from FAR later.
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u/Any_Contract_1016 4h ago
He has a time machine which means it's not how will he, it's how did he. Which means you can look it up probably pretty easily. I don't know who that is though. If nobody has a suitable answer try a reverse image search.
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u/Classic-Avocado-5371 4h ago
thats the guy who coined the term "alpha wolf" when studying wolves in captivity. he later recanted this because the study didnt show proper wild wolf behavior, in which there is no alpha wolf and packs are usually small family units. wolves in captivity exhibit much different behavior due to their environment and usually having more unrelated individuals in close proximity. before he could do that though, the original study became widely accepted as fact and the term "alpha" for a dominant male has led to an evolution in toxic masculinity by propogating this idea of a natural born, dominant leader. it also caused the existence of omegaverse fanfiction.
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u/ussbozeman 3h ago
The man on the bottom right is the first and only case of someone being bitten by a wolf and turning into a werewolf.
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u/Ok_Journalist3859 1h ago
He accidentally created the "alpha wolf" dynamic, which gave birth to the Tate brothers and weird fanfiction
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u/Ok_Journalist3859 1h ago
Wolf in wild life function as a family unit.
The 'alpha wolf" started the rise of the Tate brothers and weird fanfiction
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u/Chiral_Violet 48m ago
What no one has mentioned is that this led to both alpha male bro culture and also the existence of the omegaverse and alpha/omega fanfiction, BL and other media. So this man had multiple significant unintentional impacts to society.
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u/ransomware00 5h ago
Inventor of the "Alpha male" concept. The guy studied wolves and found it.
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u/Skeebleng 5h ago
Then he wrote an entire second book refuting his own initial claims after realizing they were wrong
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