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Well, I have known
many alpha males in my life,
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chimpanzee alpha males,
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and I'm going to talk
about what an alpha male is,
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because I think we can all learn
a lot from our close relatives
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where we have alpha males.
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And as an example, I want to give you
Amos, a male that I knew
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who was a young male
and he was alpha male,
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he was very popular,
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but he got sick
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and he lost his position because,
you know, chimpanzee males
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they can spot from a mile away
if you are weak
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and they went for him,
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and he lost his position,
and then he got sicker and sicker
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until at some point we had to isolate him.
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The group lived on a grassy island,
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and we had to isolate him in a cage,
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but we cracked open the cage
so that the rest of the chimps
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still had access to him.
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And what happened was most touching.
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Other chimps would bring food to him,
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they would bring wood wool to him,
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which is this thing that they use
to sleep in and build nests out of,
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and females would put
the wood wool behind his back.
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He was leaning heavily against the wall,
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and the way we do with pillows
to patients in a hospital,
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they were putting
that stuff behind his back.
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And I thought, this is the way
to go for an alpha male.
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He was loved and respected,
and everyone was taking care of him,
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and this is not always how it goes,
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because some males don't answer well
when they lose their position.
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So Amos was an example
of a male who was liked as a leader,
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and I think the term alpha male,
if you look it up on the internet,
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you will find all these business books
that tell you how to be an alpha male,
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and what they mean
is how to beat up others
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and beat them over the head
and let them know that you are boss
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and don't mess with me and so on.
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And basically an alpha male
for them is a bully.
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And I really don't like
that kind of description,
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because I am actually partly responsible
for the term "alpha male"
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because I wrote this book
"Chimpanzee Politics,"
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which was recommended by Newt Gingrich
to freshmen congressmen.
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I don't know what good it did,
but he recommended that book to them,
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and after that the term
"alpha male" became very popular.
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But I think it is used
in a mischaracterization.
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It's used in a very superficial way
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that doesn't relate
to what a real alpha male is.
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And so I'm here to explain what that is.
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The term itself goes back
actually much further.
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It goes back to the '40s and '50s,
research on wolves,
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and basically the definition
is very simple.
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The highest ranking male
is the alpha male.
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The highest ranking female
is the alpha female.
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Every primate group
has one alpha male, one alpha female,
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not more than that, there's only one.
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And I will explain how that goes.
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So first, the body language.
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What you see here is two male chimpanzees
who are the same size,
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but one is walking upright,
has his hair up,
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has a big rock in his hand,
and he's the alpha male.
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The other male is pant-grunting to him,
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is being submissive to him
and bowing for him,
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and that is the sort of ritual they need
to go through many times a day
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in order to have a stable relationship.
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I'll show you a video from the field.
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What you will see here
is a female pant-grunting to an alpha male
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and you will see how that goes.
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The male is approaching,
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she grunts at him.
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(Chimpanzee grunts)
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He has all his hair up
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and he displays.
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I'm actually standing far too close.
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A chimpanzee is far stronger than I am,
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and I just was not very prudent,
this particular video.
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So what you saw him do
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is he was lifting himself up
and standing on two legs,
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and putting his arms out.
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That's called the bipedal swagger.
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It's a very common posture
in high-ranking males,
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and it's very recognizable
because humans do this kind of stuff.
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(Laughter)
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Humans do this all the time.
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And what I really like
about this particular picture
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is the two old guys to the side.
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This is very chimpanzee.
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In chimpanzees,
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we have usually old males
who are over the hill,
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who cannot be alpha male
themselves anymore,
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but they start playing games
and forming coalitions,
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and behind the backs of others.
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And they become extremely influential,
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and you may actually have old males
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who are more influential
than the alpha male himself.
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Just as an example,
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the three males
that I used to work with most
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at the Dutch zoo long ago, where I worked,
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and the middle male here
is a 17-year-old alpha male.
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The male who is grooming
on the side is twice as old,
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and this old male has made him the leader.
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So you can imagine that that old male
has an enormous amount of power,
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because he has made
the alpha male alpha male.
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The male on the right
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is individually the strongest male.
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In captivity, you can test it out,
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and you can know that this male
has no trouble with either one.
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He has only trouble
with the combination of the two.
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And so the coalition formation
that goes on in chimpanzee society
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makes it much more complex than you think.
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It means, for example,
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that the smallest male in a group
can be the alpha male.
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You don't need to be
the biggest and strongest male.
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The smallest male, if he has
the right friends and keeps them happy,
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or he has female support,
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he can be the alpha male.
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So the coalition system
makes everything complex,
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and I'm always waiting here in the US
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for the primaries,
the end of the primaries,
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because that's a moment
where you need to demonstrate unity.
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Now let me first show you
how the unity is shown in chimpanzees.
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What you see here is two males on the left
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who are standing together.
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You also see the big
canine teeth that they have.
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And they're standing together and they
demonstrate to the rest of the group,
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"We are together. We are a unit."
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The males on the right
are walking together in synchrony.
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That's another way of demonstrating
that you are together.
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And so demonstrating unity
is extremely important
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in a coalition system,
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and as I said, in the primaries
always I'm waiting for that moment
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because then you have
two members of the same party
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who have been fighting with each other,
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and they need to come
together at some moment.
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And it leads to very awkward situations.
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People who don't like each other
need to embrace each other
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and stand together,
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and that's absolutely essential
for the unity of the party,
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and if you don't do that,
the party may fall apart.
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And so if it doesn't go well,
like in this particular case --
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(Laughter)
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then the party is in deep doo-doo
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because they have not demonstrated unity.
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So that's a very important part
of the coalition system,
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and that's something that we share
between humans and chimpanzees.
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Now, how do you become an alpha male?
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First of all, you need to be
impressive and intimidating
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and demonstrate your vigor on occasion
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and show that you are very strong,
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and there's all sorts
of ways of doing that.
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But other things that you need to do
is you need to be generous.
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So, for example,
males who go on a campaign
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to dethrone the leader,
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which may take two or three months
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where they're testing
all the coalitions in the group,
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they also become extremely generous.
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They share food very easily with everyone.
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Or they start to tickle
the babies of the females.
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They're normally, male chimpanzees,
not particularly interested in infants,
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but when they are campaigning like that,
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they get very interested in infants
and they tickle them,
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and they try to curry favor
with the females.
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(Laughter)
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So in humans, of course,
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I am always intrigued
by these men who are candidates
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and hold babies up like this.
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This is not particularly
something that babies like --
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(Laughter)
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but since it is a signal
to the rest of the world,
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they need to hold them in the air.
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And I was really intrigued by,
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when we had a female candidate
in the last election,
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the way she held babies
was more like this,
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which is what babies really like.
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But she of course
didn't need to send the message
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that she could hold a baby
without dropping it,
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which was what the man was doing.
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So this is a very common tactic,
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and male chimpanzees,
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they spend a lot of time
currying favor with all sorts of parties
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when they are campaigning.
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Now, what are the privileges and the costs
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of being an alpha male?
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The biggest privilege is females.
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Food is really irrelevant.
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Male chimpanzees
can go a week without food
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if there's a female in estrus
and they're sexually interested in her.
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Food is secondary to sex.
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And so the male chimpanzees --
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and we evolutionary biologists, of course,
we have an explanation for this,
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is that sex leads to reproduction,
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and reproductive success
is the measure of evolution.
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That's how everything evolves.
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And so if males can enhance
their reproductive success
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by being high ranking,
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you get automatically the ambition
to be high ranking in the males.
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So that's the privilege.
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The costs, one cost is of course
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that you need to keep your partners happy.
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So if you come to power
with the support of an old male,
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you need to let that old male
mate with females.
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If you don't do that,
that old male is going to get mad at you,
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and you're going to lose him as a partner.
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So there's a transaction going on.
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If you become alpha male this way,
you need to keep your partners happy.
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And so that's one of the costs.
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The second cost is that
everyone wants your position.
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Alpha male position
is a very important position,
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and everyone wants to take it from you,
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and so you constantly
have to watch your back.
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You have to be extremely vigilant.
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For example, you have to
disrupt the coalitions of others
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and that's what male
chimpanzees do quite a bit.
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Divide and rule strategies, they have.
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And so that's a very stressful situation,
and we actually have data on this.
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The data comes from the field,
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from baboons not chimpanzees in this case,
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where they did fecal samples
on the baboons
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and they analyzed them
for glucocorticoids.
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And what you see here is a graph
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where you see that the lower ranking
the male baboon is,
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the higher is his cortisol level
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in the feces,
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but the alpha male, as you see,
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has just as high a level
as the lowest-ranking males,
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and so you may think that being alpha male
is nice and dandy and is wonderful,
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but it's actually
a very stressful position,
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and we can demonstrate
that physiologically.
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Now, what are the obligations?
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And here, for me,
it gets really interesting,
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and it deviates very much
from your typical image of the alpha male.
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The alpha male
has two sorts of obligations.
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One is to keep the peace in the group.
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We call that the control role,
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to control fights in the group,
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and the second is to be the most empathic,
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the consoler in chief, basically,
of the nation, so to speak.
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So first of all, keeping the peace.
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This is a male who stops a fight
between two females.
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Two females on the left and the right
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have been screaming and yelling
at each other over food,
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because food is very
important for the females,
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and so he stops the fight between them
and stands between them like this.
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And it's very interesting to me
that alpha males, when they do this,
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they become impartial.
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They don't support their mom
or their best buddy.
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No, no, they stop fights,
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and they come up
for the underdog in general.
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And this makes them
extremely popular in the group,
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because they provide security
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for the lowest-ranking
members of the group.
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And so they become impartial,
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which is an unusual condition
for a chimpanzee to be in,
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because they're usually
very fond of their friends and so on,
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and these alpha males
who are good at this,
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they can be very effective
at keeping the peace in the group.
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And the second thing they do
is they show empathy for others.
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Now, I do an enormous amount
of research on empathy,
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and I don't have time to go into it,
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but empathy is nowadays a topic
that we study in rodents and dogs
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and elephants and primates,
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all sorts of animals.
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And what you see here is two bonobos.
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The one in front
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has been beaten up in a fight.
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The one in the back puts
her arms around her and consoles her.
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This is also actually how we measure
empathy in young children,
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by looking at how they respond
to distressed individuals.
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And high-ranking males,
they do a lot of this.
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High-ranking males provide an enormous
amount of comfort in the group,
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and they go to places
where there are earthquakes
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or hurricanes
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and they provide comfort.
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The pope does this.
The presidents do this.
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All the leaders in the world
have to do this job.
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The queen does it and so on.
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They all have to do this job,
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so providing consolation,
and that's a very important task.
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And males who are good at these two,
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keeping the peace and providing comfort,
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they become extremely popular leaders,
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and there's actually
some self-interest involved in it.
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They don't do it just for the group,
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because it also stabilizes their position.
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The more popular
a male becomes as alpha male
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and the more the rest of them
respects them and looks up to them,
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the better their position is defended
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in case it's going to be
challenged by somebody else,
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because then, of course, the whole group
is going to support that male
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because they want to keep
a leader who is good for them.
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So the group is usually very supportive
of males who are good leaders,
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and it's not supportive at all of bullies.
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And when bullies lose their position,
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they made end up
in a very bad situation there.
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This is data actually
on the consolation behavior.
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This is data on consolation
in chimpanzees,
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and you see for the medium-
and low-ranking individuals,
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the females do more of it than the males.
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This is basically the whole community.
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And this is true for all
the mammal studies on empathy
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is that females
have more of it than males.
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But look at the alpha male.
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The alpha male does
far more than anybody else.
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And so that's the data on alpha males
being the consoler in chief, basically.
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The last thing I want to say
is something about alpha females.
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This is a picture of Mama,
the alpha female in the Arnhem zoo
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where I used to work,
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who is now all over the internet,
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I think a hundred million
clicks at the moment,
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for a video of her dying at the age of 59,
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which happened last year.
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And Mama was an absolute
centrum of the group.
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So she was not physically capable
of dominating the males.
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She ranked below the males,
but she was the center of the community,
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and if there was big trouble
in the community,
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everyone would end up in the arms of Mama.
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And so she was a very important figure.
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And so I don't want to minimize
the position of alpha females
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in the chimpanzee group.
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And then we have a species
that is equally close to us
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as the chimpanzee, the bonobo.
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We often forget about the bonobo,
but the bonobos have a matriarchal society
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and the alpha individual
is a female, generally.
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Generally, it's a female
who is at the top of the community,
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and we know much less
about how this is done
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and how they get to that position,
and what they do with it,
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because we know much less
about bonobos in general.
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But I do want to emphasize
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that the alpha in a group
doesn't need to be a male,
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and that actually in one
of our close relatives, it is a female.
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So the message I want to leave you with
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is that if you are looking
at men in our society
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who are the boss of, let's say,
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a family or a business
or Washington or whatever,
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you call them alpha male,
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you should not insult chimpanzees
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by using the wrong label.
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(Laughter)
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You should not call a bully an alpha male.
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Someone who is big and strong
and intimidates and insults everyone
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is not necessarily an alpha male.
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An alpha male has all sorts of qualities,
-
and I have seen bully
alpha males in chimpanzees,
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they do occur,
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but most of the ones that we have
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have leadership capacities
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and are integrated in their community,
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and, like Amos at the end,
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they are loved and respected,
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and so it's a very different situation
than you may think.
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And I thank you.
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(Applause)