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Comment by hypertele-Xii | Hacker News Reader

Which social animal does not organize into a hierarchy?

Social animals organize into hierarchies precisely because hierarchies bubble quality to the top.

The difficulty with this argument is what we mean by "quality". It's tautological to state that hierarchies select for "qualities that enable you to be higher on the hierarchy"; it's much more debatable as to the nature of those qualities (and, indeed, that the existence of the hierarchy itself doesn't change the fitness surface, so that the advantageous qualities are different to what they might have been without it). See, eg, the amount of energy antlered deer (especially males) expend on having large, healthy antlers, purely to compete with other male deer. "Having large antlers" is a "quality" that has very little adaptive value outside of the conditions created by the fact of a hierarchy itself.

> See, eg, the amount of energy antlered deer (especially males) expend on having large, healthy antlers, purely to compete with other male deer.

Deers have antlers for reasons other than competing with other deer. To defend themselves from predators.

Since they have them, they use them to settle differences in quality. In this case, quality of self-defence.

None of that is hierarchy as we normally use the term.

I can't help you if you're determined to normalize nonsense, but that's precisely what 'hierarchy' means. Perhaps you're tunnel visioning on a particular kind of hierarchy, a violent dominance hierarchy. But those haven't been a thing in social animals for a while now, because tyrants meet untimely ends when the herd grows wise.

>Perhaps you're tunnel visioning on a particular kind of hierarchy, a violent dominance hierarchy. But those haven't been a thing in social animals for a while now, because tyrants meet untimely ends when the herd grows wise.

Violent dominance is a very good way to describe hierarchy in many extant social mammals. Tyrants arise every day in both human and non-human animals. We aren't a century removed from one of the worst here in 2022. Are you thinking of eusocial mammals? The'yre closer to what you're describing here.

Lions for example - they live in aliances. Wild boars. Quite a lot of social animals live actually in families. It is hierarchy insofar adults are raising the children, but the children leave as adults and make own families. There is not much bubbling up and down.

Also, in herd animals like sheep the hierarchy consist on basically more aggressive individual eating fist and getting what they want. But, the other members dont follow them and there is no meaning of leadership. Just that, if you are stronger and beat others, you can eat first or pick place to sleep.

> Social animals organize into hierarchies precisely because hierarchies bubble quality to the top.

They don't. In business, it can be "cheapest" or "lies the most convincingly" or "has the right connections".

Even among humans, the quality that fairy often bubbles on top is violence. You see that everywhere in the world. In Chechenia it is Kadyrov and his quality was "born to correct dad and already have proven he is ruthless when dad dies". The quality that got Adolf Hitler on top was "good speaker, able to channel fear and hate".

Those are extreme examples, but I wanted something super clear. What bubbles on top is what bubbles on top. It can occasionally be quality, but it can be host of other things too.

If you've ever watched a herd of horses, you'd know that's not true. Dominance bubbles to the top. Pushiness bubbles to the top. If the animal is also a decent leader, then great. A lot of the time it's insecure and too busy trying to maintain its position and the rest of the herd ends up harried and banged up.

Seen it in dogs too, seen it a million times in people. Those are more artificial situations though.

You are proving my point. Strength and leadership are survival qualities to wild herd animals. The hierarchy allows those qualities to rise to the top. It is the herd that collectively decides to give space to the individual with those qualities. The "alpha horse" does not "dominate" the herd; no single individual can match the strength of an entire herd. The herd gives permission for the qualities to reach top of hierarchy, because those are the qualities the herd wants to select for.

If the animals making up the hierarchy disagrees with the individual on top, they remove it from the hierarchy. Easily. That's the whole point of herds, packs, and hierarchies. Together stronger than alone.

"qualities" and "quality" are two different things. Pushiness is quality as in "property", but not "quality" as in "the degree of excellence of something." In this case, lower quality individual bubbles on top, cause other horses don't want to deal with jerks aggression.

> If the animals making up the hierarchy disagrees with the individual on top, they remove it from the hierarchy. Easily. That's the whole point of herds, packs, and hierarchies. Together stronger than alone.

You write about it as if animals were rational systems thinkers and that is just not so.

> Pushiness is quality as in "property", but not "quality" as in "the degree of excellence of something."

It's quality as in the degree of excellence of pushiness.

> In this case, lower quality individual bubbles on top, cause other horses don't want to deal with jerks aggression.

That would be a higher quality individual, according to the horses.

> You write about it as if animals were rational systems thinkers and that is just not so.

We're talking about behavior that evolved millions of years ago in crustaceans, the serotonin brain system that specializes in regulating social hierarchies in animals, is still present and functioning today in you and the horses. Attribution of rationality is on your part, and in no way diminishes the effectiveness of the social brain, and the hierarchy which it encodes.

I feel like you misunderstood my post. I said that pushy, dominant horses end up at the top of the hierarchy. That pushy, dominant horse might be a good leader or it might be insecure or just plain mean and spend its time chasing the rest of the herd around and picking fights. I think I used the phrase "harried and banged up" to describe the state of the herd in this situation. I suppose that in the long run, evolution-wise, that animal's offspring are less likely to survive. During its lifetime, however, it beats up the other horses and they lose body condition as the dominant horse can't chill out and let the band graze.

Sounds like a local optimum, a difficult, unsolved problem permeating everything. How do you know if the good you've got is the best you can have?

Hierarchy is one approximate solution, but hardly the globally optimal one.

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