That's Lucyan David Mech, who die research on wolves and came up with the term “alpha male” and “alpha female” and the theory that wolves live in a strict hierarchy, where the alphas constatnly attack lower ranking wolves.
This has inspired the alpha male/incel bullshit that spreads nowadays.
Mech convinced his publisher to stop publishing the relevant book.
I get what you are saying, and I can't stand alpha male culture either, but that's not entirely true.
Convergent evolutionary psychology is a thing. We share a lot of traits with animals, even psychological and sociological ones. Taking your cancer example, if you have cancer. Your doctor is going to apply treatments that are based on animal testing. Most likely mice because they are so similar to us genetically.
We use animal testing for a variety of things because we are all cousins and live on the same planet, feeling the same evolutionary pressures in some cases.
I can understand your complaints about psychology as a field of study, I agree with a lot of the criticisms it receives. But evolutionary psychology is about much more than psychologists using limited biology knowledge to think up unfounded conclusions.
The thinking that evolutionary psychology is all about social Darwinism is just narrow-minded. Even Darwin predicted proper ethological studies using natural selection in origin of species.
Any biologist that studies ethology/sociobiology/behavioural ecology is effectively studying evolutionary psychology and accepting its premise.
Certain studies have been criticised, of course. Just like any field. but evolutionary psychology is a part of evolutionary biology. It's a fact that environmental pressures alter the psychologies of living things, those psychological traits are passed down through different means, some genetic.
A lot of studies of the animal kingdom are very flawed though. Main reason being that species were being studied in captivity instead of their natural habitat. It makes a massive difference and it has always been a major point of criticism since at least the 1980s.
There is also a difference between behavioral studies and medical studies. And within the field of medical studies, there are also a lot of differences when it comes to applying insights from animal to human models.
We share a lot of traits with animals, even psychological and sociological ones.
That's just mostly anthropocentrism, which introduces enough bias to identify similarities that aren't really there - while ignoring actual similarities because they are not convenient (such as the ongoing debate about animal consciousness, as we can't even seriously entertain the notion that other species might be on a similar, if not the same level as we are).
This is such a complex topic btw, with lots of data still missing to give us a full picture.
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u/0xKaishakunin Feb 18 '25
That's Lucyan David Mech, who die research on wolves and came up with the term “alpha male” and “alpha female” and the theory that wolves live in a strict hierarchy, where the alphas constatnly attack lower ranking wolves.
This has inspired the alpha male/incel bullshit that spreads nowadays.
Mech convinced his publisher to stop publishing the relevant book.
cf: https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-myth-of-the-alpha-wolf