Upcoming event
Heron-Allen Lecture: Richard Wrangham on 'The Alpha-Alliance'
Location
Simpkins Lee Theatre, Lady Margaret Hall
Start date
Professor Richard Wrangham
The Alpha-Alliance: A new explanation for the persistent maleness of human institutions
All are welcome to join us for the annual Heron-Allen Lecture, hosted by WildCRU and LMH. This year's lecture will be delivered by Professor Richard Wrangham, Emeritus Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University.
Professor Wrangham’s lecture will discuss why human societies have tended to be politically dominated by groups of older men, called alpha alliances. The lecture will present evidence that alpha alliances began with the origin of Homo sapiens, and will explain their influence on the evolution of the psyche and on diverse institutions such as law and religion. Professor Wrangham will emphasise that societal variation in the power of alpha alliances offers hope for increasing gender equality in future generations.
Booking
This lecture is free to attend, but we recommend reserving your space via the booking form below.
Read the full abstract
About the talk
Many small-scale societies, including mobile hunter-gatherers, are commonly referred to as “egalitarian,” meaning that equality of political influence is valued and enforced by societal norms. The term “egalitarian” is misleading, however, because in general the egalitarian principle applies only to married men. Married men tend to dominate both bachelors and women, partly by controlling coercive institutions such as law and religion, and ultimately by their monopolizing the legitimate use of execution to punish norm violators. I call the sub-group that dominates hunter-gatherer society the alpha-alliance. Male-dominated alpha-alliances appear to be universal in humans.
The conclusion that human societies are dominated by an alpha-alliance composed mainly of older males is rarely noted, but it is important because it suggests hypotheses about the evolution and dynamics of political systems. Primatological, paleoanthropological and ethnographic data indicate that alpha-alliances had originated by 300,000 years ago because they allowed subordinates males to conspire to to eliminate individual alphas as reproductive competitors. This superficially minor novelty had large consequences, because a subgroup of males who could cooperate to kill an alpha could kill anyone. That meant that after temporary coalitions of killers evolved into a longterm alliance, the alliance had unconstrained power over the rest of society. Nowadays imprisonment has largely replaced execution as the threat used by alpha-alliances, but whether via imprisonment or execution, overwhelming coercive power continues to allow alpha alliances to dominate society far more completely than occurs in any non-human mammal.
The alpha alliance’s use of coercive power appears to have had diverse evolutionary effects on human society and psychology, including the creation of institutions, the emergence of a moral conscience, the amplification of dominance by senior males over women and junior males, and the origin of Homo sapiens.