The reason why so many woman find Clooney or DiCaprio so attractive is not their looks. It's things like being the center of attention.
(And the opposite: people with wealth and status that only attract cheap gold-digger types, and women in general could not care less for).
I recommend The Evolution of Desire or The Red Queen. Both fascinating.
Wealth, I believe, is only interesting in this equation to the extend it confers status, or at least coincides with it. Beta-males/low-status guys who win the lottery typically gets taken advantage of, rather than swooned over.
Not always. It can be just the local barman or barista that women swoon for. Or just a guy in the office, with the same rank as 30 others. It can even be an unemployed bum. Heck, women went wild over some felon last year:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/hot-convict-jeremy-mee...
What it gets down to is: there is such a thing as male good looks, it's not all status and wealth. And Clooney and Pitt etc certainly have those too.
In other words, I think there are actually humans who are usefully described as "alpha", but they are rare enough that most people will never actually meet one in their lifetimes.
If that is true, thinking about this dynamic as useful in understanding the people they actually do interact with easily becomes misleading.
There are certainly many people who like to think of themselves as "alpha" but invariably in my experience they have been obviously, and demonstrably, wrong.
Maybe not a full blown "alpha" (that would e.g. be their political leaders, CEOs, etc, so they will affect their lives, even if they don't get to meet one as a colleague/friend), but in most group scenarios there would be some people exerting much more influence than the others, even without a higher rank.
but in most group scenarios there would be some people exerting much more influence than the others
What I'm saying is that the alpha/beta modeling of this is lazy and misleading, and better avoided.
A very few politicians and a very few CEOs meet a useful definition of alpha, in my opinion. Your point about rank affecting influence is true, but I think irrelevant to my point.
The "alpha"/"beta" wolf-pack dynamics were debunked a while ago. Packs are typically made up of parents (previously referred to as "alphas") and children (previously referred to as "betas").
Status is definitely important, but the alpha/beta/omega/gamma/delta/greek-anthropomorphism thing is a load of crap.