What is a man? Even Darwin rejected the myth of the “alpha male”

A recently published meta-analysis in the journal PLOS One found that women have historically been hunters. The longstanding myth of hunters versus gatherers, that only men take down large game while women squat to collect plants and nuts seems to be a romanticized notion of labor division between genders. The truth is more complex.

Scouring 150 years of ethnographic data, the researchers discovered that women hunt anything from small to large game in the majority of the 1,400 societies studied. Intriguingly, women's hunting strategies are more flexible and social than those of men. The "survival of the fittest" ethos — one constantly cited and championed in today's manosphere podcast world — isn't as gendered as we believe.

Even evolution's pioneering scientist Charles Darwin knew that. First off, the term was coined by English polymath Herbert Spencer after he read "On the Origin of Species." Darwin only began using "survival of the fittest"  in the book's 5th edition. Still, the catchphrase has trickled down as a historical truism. Strong men, the narrative goes, propagate the species and are most responsible for civilizational successes.

But Darwin wasn't so sure. A dozen years after his opus caused tsunamis in the biological and social worlds, the naturalist put forward a divergent path for evolution. In "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex," he speculates that sexual selection wasn't as simple as "man hits woman with club before dragging her to cave." In this rendering, women play a dominant role in mate choice, and therefore evolution.

And what drives female behavior, according to Yale ornithologist Richard Prum, is beauty. Yet, as Prum writes, this latter theory has largely been ignored, and outright scorned: "Aesthetic evolution by mate choice is an idea so dangerous that it had to be laundered out of Darwinism itself in order to preserve the omnipotence of the explanatory power of natural selection."

Darwin didn't rule out natural selection, his original term for "survival of the fittest." He just didn't believe it told the complete story. Being an inquisitive scientist, he kept searching for clues that spell out how we became the animal we are.

Why hasn't Darwin's sequel been as widely embraced? Why don't biohacking podcasters discuss this addendum to the man's masterwork? A concurrent theory of evolution is a dazzling prospect, especially in an age when contrarian thinking dominates media cycles. 

Biology has largely been dominated by male researchers. While unbiased science is a nice idea, confirmation bias and the fact that we like simple answers have seeped into evolutionary theory. The binary of "a man is a man and a woman is a woman," and the preselected boxes that each gender has been placed in, has governed social thinking for generations.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

Darwin wasn't the only scientist to question our perception of gender roles. Primatologist Frans de Waal is responsible for popularizing the term "alpha male" after reading about the "lead wolf" in wolf research. Writing about alpha males in his 1982 book, Chimpanzee Politics, de Waal quickly observed that American Republicans and business leaders mischaracterized his research. The strong man mentality took hold.

"People overestimate male dominance mainly because they think purely in physical terms, but primate societies are political systems and physical power is only one part of the whole equation," de Waal says.

Differences between male and female qualities are largely overblown. De Waal cites the work of anthropologist Robert Martin, who said the difference between genders can be accounted for by bimodal differences — statistical, though with a lot of exceptions. Having spent 50 years in the field with chimpanzees, de Waal regularly observed gender fluidity in our closest cousins. Biological sex doesn't necessarily account for social or physical behaviors.

"I've known quite a few individuals among the males who don't exactly act like males or females who don't act like females," he continues. "Individual variability is basically the material of evolution, and that's the same sort of diversity that we see in human society."

Gender variability isn't an issue in chimp societies, which are less normative and ideological than our own. Individuals are accepted for what they are, sans moral grandstanding. Deviation is normal.

Importantly, gender norms and roles evolve with societies, be they ape, human or otherwise. Yet a certain contingent of the human population has attempted to codify gender with religious certainty.

This trend is especially apparent in American politics, where men from Donald Trump to, more recently, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are lauded as ideal "alpha males," be it from the brute force of their rhetoric to eight-and-a-half mediocre pushups at the mecca of physical culture. Inevitably, physical prowess is equated with moral fortitude, fueling gendered stereotypes in the image the perceiver wishes to be true.

Whereas aspiring alpha men describing the qualities of alpha men to other aspiring alpha men on Twitter is commonplace, so these same men attempt to define women. Their definitions run a narrow gamut, from a sappy return to 1950's-era Christian moralizing to an outright refusal to accept that gender diversity has long been a feature of our species. They place all their faith in the boisterous, muscular chimp rampaging through the forest instead of understanding the complex social dynamics at the foundation of the society — or the necessary and powerful role that females play in the construction of the tribe.

All of this begs the question: What is a man? Many experts have struggled with that question, with varying levels of success. They know the roles assigned are written by societies and open to interpretation. They also know these roles evolve and that diversity and fluidity are features, not bugs.

That's not what you'd learn by listening to non-experts pontificate on longform podcasts. There, you'll discover all the bullish rhetoric of aspiration with none of the scientific chops. Inquiry and curiosity are absent. No care of scientific holism — and certainly no empathy. Here you find a very specific type of man, one indignant over the fact that society is honoring what nature does best — evolve — and you hear very clearly that he can't keep up.