How to Make a Myth, and Then Debunk It (Ep. 42)
Non-human primate societies originally were described by male scientists largely as dramas of alpha males: battles, heroics, and constant dominance over females. Those mid-20th-century men’s findings were riddled with reports and analyses of male aggression and hierarchy. But in the late 20th-century, during the global rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement, a new cohort of female primatologists were allowed to enter the academic discipline. A few key women primatologists examined female roles within the troops, as well as the roles occupied by other less-dominant male individuals whom earlier scientists had dismissed as peripheral.
By asking new questions and challenging those early, widely-accepted theories, the women constructed an understanding of primate societies that was more finessed, accurate and complete. They were so successful in this endeavor and their work was so convincing, that male predecessors in the field of primatology readily agreed their own conclusions had been mistaken. They recognized that their narrow focus on the actions of what they labelled “alpha males” had been misplaced.
Samara Greenwood is PhD candidate in the academic field called the “History of Philosophy of Science,” and in her dissertation, she examines why those first scholarly articles on the culture within primate societies were so widely read and accepted. She also has examined how those journal articles managed to influence the culture of the general public. Even today, outside of science and inside the general culture of the United States and Australia, the true picture verified by primatologists hasn’t yet overthrown the erroneous beliefs about the roles of alpha males.
In the episode, Samara describes ways that the newer story could potentially take hold–and encourages us to join in and make it happen. “Whether it’s right or wrong,” she says, “there’s a strong connection about how we imagine nature and how we imagine ourselves.”
"The stories we tell about nature become the stories we tell about ourselves."
– Samara Greenwood, PhD Candidate in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
Learn More About Samara
Samara is an academic researcher, public humanities broadcaster, and postgraduate scholar in History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) at the University of Melbourne. Her work focuses on how the women’s liberation movement of the late twentieth century impacted the theories and practices of primatology in the United States. She is also interested in how interactions between innovative craftspeople, practical mathematicians, and natural philosophers contributed to the emergence of “Galilean science” in early modern Italy.
Samara is the founding producer of The HPS Podcast, which features conversations from History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science. You can listen to that podcast here. [https://www.samaragreenwood.com/] Her work was also recently featured quite beautifully in an interview on “The Philosopher’s Zone” podcast, which you can listen to here [https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/philosopherszone/how-feminism-changed-primatology/105199142].
Seminal Books, People, and Theories on the Topic
According to Samara, three women who revolutionized the field of primatology in the late 20th–century were:
* Sally Slocum, one of the key feminist scholars who challenged the “Man the Hunter” theory. The “very famous and influential paper” Samara mentioned she published is called “Women the Gatherer: male bias in anthropology,” and you can read it here. [https://www.scribd.com/document/791430551/Slocum-Male-Bias]
* Jane Lancaster, Sally’s associate and another feminist primatologist who rethought the military model. Her famous article was called “In Praise of the Female Monkey,” published in 1973 in Psychology Today. Jane teaches today at the University of New Mexico in the Anthropology Department as a Distinguished Professor. She is also an editor of Human Nature: An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective.
* Donna Jeanne Haraway, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Santa_Cruz] and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_studies]. Her book, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science [https://www.routledge.com/Primate-Visions-Gender-Race-and-Nature-in-the-World-of-Modern-Science/Haraway/p/book/9780415902946] examined how human cultural perspectives—particularly those regarding race, gender, and class—shaped scientific narratives and methodologies within primatology
Samara also mentioned the book Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes, which was written by Frans De Waal, a Dutch scientist who challenged a number of assumptions about non-human primates. You can read it here [https://www.amazon.nl/-/en/Frans-Waal/dp/0801886562]. The article that Jill read an excerpt from was called “The Camps Promising To Turn You And Your Son Into An Alpha Male,” by Charles Bethea. It was published in a March issue of The New Yorker [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/06/the-camps-promising-to-turn-you-or-your-son-into-an-alpha-male] magazine.
Transcript of This Conversation
Riddell: Science is extraordinarily powerful, yet scientists are
still human beings embedded in culture so they don’t merely observe nature,
they interpret it. And human interpretations are always going to be shaped by
things like our upbringing in our family and the broader culture and our
beliefs about things like gender norms and human nature. Sometimes what ends up
changing science is not just new data, but new individuals entering an academic
field and then being curious about different questions than their predecessors
were. Today we’re going to be talking about chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas,
animals that share 98% of their DNA sequence with ours. And yeah, we’re going
to be talking about how our understanding of our close relatives has changed
over time. Welcome to The Shape of the World. I’m Jill Riddell.
Greenwood: Hi, I’m Samara Greenwood and I am a PhD candidate in history
and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
Riddell: Hi, Samara. Welcome to The Shape of the World.
Greenwood: Thank you so much. It’s lovely to be here.
Riddell: So Samara, what first attracted you to this arena of study
of studying the people who study chimpanzees and gorillas?
Greenwood: It is quite a convoluted story. Yeah, I was actually a
practicing architect for the first half of my career. Really? Yes. So I am late
to the academic scene, but absolutely love it. So what happened was that it was
about 10 years ago, I had to drastically reduce my workload, health reasons,
and decided to go back to study this thing called history and philosophy of
science. And when I took my first class just as just a one-off subject, I just
absolutely fell in love with the discipline of HPS. What we do is look at
science and history and knowledge from this very different perspective. We sort
of incorporate a whole lot of approaches from humanities and we really dig
deep. So that’s what I kind of first was attracted to. Then as part of my
studies, I came across this case study about the history of primatology and how
primatology and feminism came to interact during the 1970s.
And this stood out for me for lots of different reasons. I
was really interested in how female scientists were really doing significant
work to improve the discipline.
Riddell: Yeah. So let’s talk about how you got interested in
primatology in particular. I’m curious before coming into that program, did you
like monkeys as a kid? Were you a fan of Curious George? Did you have any
affinity with them or knowledge about them?
Greenwood: The short answer is no. I wasn’t huge into monkeys as a kid
or even as an adult. It was more that I’d always been interested in the human
side of things. So in the scientists and in the social change and in social
groupings. And this was a way into that through this case study. But I have
since become very interested in monkeys and apes and particularly their social
life.
Riddell: So before we get into the late 20th century critique and the
reevaluation of the earlier practitioners of primatology, what is the history
of primatology? When did Western scientists start formally observing and
theorizing about what they were observing when they looked at troops of
primates?
Greenwood: This is very much a 20th century story. There were sporadic
kind of field studies done before that, but they were very anecdotal. So it’s
really the 20th century where it becomes kind of systematized and becomes a
discipline. And what you see is an important distinction between studying
primates in captivity and studying them in the wild. So they’re both part of
primatology, but the first studies were really done in captivity and it’s only
really after the Second World War in the late 1950s through the 1960s that
sustained study of primate social behavior in Africa and Asia really began to
take off amongst Western researchers.
Riddell: Okay. So that’s not even that long ago. That’s like 70 years
ago. What was the prevailing narrative of those early days that the women that
you were studying were responding to?
Greenwood: All right. So I want to tell two quick stories here. So one of
the earliest influential theories in primatology actually came from those early
studies that were done in captivity. So this is one that was actually studying
baboons in a London zoo. The key figure here is Solly Zuckerman is his name. In
1932, he presented primate society as fundamentally organized around sex and
competition among males for access to females. This is what he suggested bonded
the group together, male aggression to get to the females. But when he was
doing this study, he was drawing on really abnormal and very violent behavior
in this really unusual circumstance that happened at the zo. So it’s not
something that happens actually when you get out into the wild, but his theory
was taken very seriously at the time. The first round of field studies going
out into seeing baboons in the natural environment quickly undermined that
picture. So they were working against this idea that sex is what
bound primate societies together, but the replacement theory also had its
problems. In what later became known as the military model of primate behavior,
males were seen as the center again of the society. Supposedly the society was
held together by a core of dominant aggressive males who maintained order
through hierarchy and force. So if you can see why it’s called the military
model, right? It’s like there’s a general,
There’s some lower down ranking males and then everything
else is just sort of peripheral to that. So particularly females, younger
animals and what they would call less dominant males were treated as secondary
to kind of the real action of the group. So although that older theory fell
away, it was replaced by this second model that still gave a very highly
simplified, very male centered account of primate society.
Riddell: One thing that’s interesting about that to me is that
essentially the first people that were trying to understand the behavior of,
was it baboons, did you say, or was it- Yes. Yes. Yes,
Greenwood: Baboons.
Riddell: So the first people trying to understand the behavior of
baboons, basically it would be like observing men in prison. They were in
captivity. Yes. They happened to have females around in this case, but I mean
it was a very, I think what you could describe it as a very abnormal
conditions.
Greenwood: That’s right. Exactly. And in this case, the one in the London Zoo
was that the proportions were all out of whack. So there was so many males and
only a few females. Females ended up getting killed as part of the aggression
and the rage that went on, which is again, not what happens out in the wild. So
exactly that. It’s a very artificial, abnormal, distorted situation, but the
observations were used to create quite an influential theory. So you can see
the problems there.
Riddell: Yes, I can see that. I can see the problems there. So
generally when we know the names, just general people in the public who aren’t
in the sciences, when we know the name of a scientist, it’s generally a male
scientist because the predominant gender that’s in the sciences are male. But
interestingly, if you’re going to ask a person on the street, who do you know
who is famous for studying chimpanzees, for example, it’s not impossible that
that person is going to know Jane Goodall’s name. So when did Jane Goodall and
Diane Fossey start their work and what was happening with the men working with
the military model?
Greenwood: So absolutely. So Jane Goodall begins in the late 50s, so
very much at the start of this big boom in primatology. So as you say, she’s
working with chimpanzees. She’s looking at all sorts of innovative tool use
amongst chimpanzees. And so she’s coming up with some really radical
observations that are very, very different. She’s getting lots of publicity,
but it’s not seen as a contrast to this other one. They’re just two different
kinds of studies happening at the time.
Riddell: Oh, so it wasn’t perceived as a challenge to that model?
Greenwood: No, no, not Jane Goodall’s stuff. It really came later. So
there was studies being done in Japan, there were studies being done by all
sorts of people, but the core theory got so much publicity that all of that
other study that was showing much more diverse kind of actions and behaviors
just wasn’t getting that same kind of traction. It was only when the feminist
scientists really pointed out this disjunction, right? That you have all this
evidence out there that this isn’t the right model and yet we’re still going
along with it. Why is that?
Riddell: Well, let’s talk about that a little bit. I’m thinking about
the time period that you’re speaking of when the men were first doing these
studies and frankly, most men had to be in the military during that time
period. Many of them, they themselves would have been in conditions where they
were following orders or perhaps if they were an officer giving orders and the
male hierarchy I think is a lot clearer when you’re in the military. Do you
think that that had some kind of an effect on it? Aside from just the general
conditions of patriarchy, I guess I’m really kind of hung up on this word
military because I think that if you’ve lived through that and it’s been such a
formative experience for you, I can see where you might look for replications
of that in other places where maybe it doesn’t actually fit.
Greenwood: That’s interesting. As far as I know, the two main people
that generated the theory, Sherwood Washburn and Irven DeVore, I don’t believe
either of them had military training. I would have to double check on that, but
I’m pretty confident on that. And funnily, I’ve showed Washburn, who’s the
supervisor, he actually has a background in supporting civil rights movement, for
example, during the ’60s. So he’s more of a social progressive, I would say, in
a light form. There is a bit of a disjunction there. It’s not a clear link
between why they’re promoting this kind of military view and their own personal
background. It seems to be more about just assumptions about how males and
females work in everyday society, very much sort of family ideas about the head
of the household and the wife being less dominant, less leadership material.
Riddell: And I mean, they also were following on the heels of
somebody who had done these studies in the zoo in this strange situation. So
they had that kind of as a predecessor.
Greenwood: Yeah. Yes, that’s true.
Riddell: So let’s go forward and get to what you’re interested in.
Tell us about second wave feminism and the women who began writing a history of
that science and a critique of that science of primatology, how they began to
come up with those ideas and how their ideas started to get a toehold.
Greenwood: Right. So second wave feminism obviously starts in the
1960s, but what we get in the late 1960s, so around 1968 is a stream of second
wave feminism, often termed the Women’s Liberation Movement, right? So this is
a bit more radical and it’s trying to go beyond just asking for equality for
women in the workplace and in terms of income to go, “Actually, what are
some deep assumptions that we have about women in society and let’s question
those assumptions. Are women really naturally secondary to men? Do women really
not fit leadership roles? Is this a true story or is this just something that
we’ve come to accept?” And so you get this broad movement happening in
society and then what I look at is a couple of the earliest feminist
scientists, these aren’t critics of science, they’re scientists themselves.
They’re trained in primatology. They both have connections to Sherwood
Washburn, who is one of the originators of this military model and they very
much admire him, but yet they’re seeing this problem in this model based on
what they’re learning from feminism.
They’re going, “Oh, here’s this question that’s come up
about what we’re assuming in society more broadly. We can see how this actually
applies to this theory in this discipline that we are actively engaged in. This
is something that should be talked about.
Riddell: And why? What were some of the things that they were
noticing? What were they observing that the male scholars before them had not?
Greenwood: So when I looked at this, I look at the first two feminist
scientists work. So you’ve got Sally Slocum who presents a very famous and
influential paper in 1970. So this is very early on. We’ve got late 1968 is
when Women’s Lib Movement is coming up and then just a year and a half later,
she’s presenting a very influential paper about challenging male bias in
society to in this case anthropology. So she’s not at primatology yet. She’s
looking at theories of evolution also produced by Sherwood Washburn. So the
same individual is doing theories in anthropology and in primatology and they
are linked. And so his theory is called Man the Hunter, right? The theory is
that the rise of hunting in early human life is what generated a whole lot of
higher human capacities. For example, high levels of communication and
cooperation, tool use. This we owe to the hunters of the past is almost a
verbatim quote from Washburn’s work.
Now, Sally Slocum is only a young graduate student. She’s a
PhD student like me and she gets involved in the feminist movement. She’s drawn
into a consciousness raising group. So if you haven’t heard of these before,
this is what happened in the Women’s Liberation Movement. One of the main
avenues for spreading these ideas was to have small groups of women get
together across … They’d be based on universities or just different
communities, particularly across the United States, but it spread to Australia and
to Europe. You’d get these little groups together and you’d read challenging
material like letters or articles that feminists had put together going, let’s
rethink how all these assumptions that we’ve grown up with. So for instance,
Sally Slocum says she went along kind of reluctantly to the first one, but she
had that aha moment. She was given a piece about domestic work, right?
So she’s married at the time and it was saying how even the
most progressive male will not do the housework and they have all these excuses
why … And through this article, she debunks what all of those excuses are. If
we really are equal, surely these things need to be brought to the surface. And
she said that because she could see that reality in her own life, it kind of
helped her, sort of opened her eyes to seeing other examples where there was a
disjunction between what was being presented as truth and real and natural and
what actually potentially the real story was, that maybe that real story was
quite different. And so with some of her friends who were also involved in
anthropology, got discussing this particular topic and saw how it applied to Sherwood
Washburn, the hunter model of evolution. Sally Slocum writes this paper, she
presents it at a conference and it’s like it’s a bomb goes off.
It’s like, ” I’ve had my consciousness raised and now I
see we talk about man and man’s place in nature and we say that means humanity,
but really does it? Because all the focus is on the males and not on the
females and that doesn’t make sense. Surely females were equally important to
evolution as males and so you’re saying this hunting thing’s really important,
but you’re saying females didn’t do it. Where’s the females in this story? And
when she digs into the research again that had already been done, what she
finds is that there’s already loads of evidence
Riddell: And what are some examples of things that it turned out that
the female chimpanzees or gorillas or whatever the primates were that were
being studied What were some of the examples of things that clearly the females
were the ones that had developed those tools in the first place or they’re the
ones that had created improvements on them? Did they have concrete examples of
things that had just been overlooked?
Greenwood: So what happens is Sally Slocum has an associate called Jane
Lancaster who studies monkeys and apes. Jane’s also involved in feminism and
she says, “Oh, this isn’t just a problem in how we look at the history of
humanity. It’s also a problem in how we’re looking at primates.” So she’s
taking that insight and moving it across to a new discipline. What she sees is
that in this military model, there’s a lot of derivations of it so that it
becomes popularized not just through the theorists, but also through scholars
within primatology who write for the public. So you get sort of public books
coming out. There’s tigers men in groups which take that and kind of apply it
to humanity and they’re like, “This is ridiculous.” Here we are
getting this theory that’s been formed on very little evidence and it’s being
promoted as this answer to a whole lot of human issues when, and what she did
is Jane Lancaster was very much across the current literature.
So she didn’t just know the military model. She knew pretty
much all of the primatology research being done at that time because as I said,
it wasn’t a huge field, it was emerging and it was developing so you could know
quite a lot about it at one particular point. And Jane was right at the center
and she knew all of this. And so she started, as you said, bringing up these
examples of, “Hang on, we’ve got all of these counter examples that just
don’t match what’s saying.” So for example, there was evidence that rather
than males and male hierarchies being what held primate society together, then
in most cases it was really sort of small family subunits based around older
females typically because what happens is the males move quite often, not
always, but you get males moving from group to group. So they’re not providing
long-term stability.
It’s the females that are there all the way through their
lifespan and who are producing offspring. You have females that are forming
coalitions and acting aggressively towards males that are doing the wrong
thing. So they’re showing some sense of control over the group through
aggression as well as the males. So where does that come into the story? You
have female monkeys and apes that are responsible for innovation and for
translating innovation to the next generation through teaching. So for example,
by finding a new way to forage for food. So there’s all of these kinds of
examples that come out that just go, “This story is much more complicated
than what we’re being presented with. ” And so I think she basically says
in her own article, which I love the name of, it’s called In Praise of the
Achieving Female Monkey. And so in her article, she’s really like, “Hang
on, let’s stop and take stock here. Let’s rethink how we’re going about this
business.”
Riddell: I love that title too. So around what time, what year was
the military model of primate survival truly rejected or recognized to be only
on part of the story? Did it ever get to a place where it’s maybe even laughed
about as one of those hilarious anachronistic mistakes that humans make? No
one’s still defending it or does that theory still have legs within the
academic field of primatology?
Greenwood: Yeah. Well, my research really looks from 1950s through to
the early 1990s. And what we see is that during the 1970s it gradually gets
challenged on all sorts of fronts, but it’s still into the 80s, it’s still
being challenged. And I would say it’s around the mid 80s is when it feels like
it’s thoroughly debunked. Everyone’s understanding there’s a much more complex
story than this and you even see Irvin Devor. So he’s one of the main authors
coming out and going, “No, I got it wrong. I did one small study and we
extrapolated from that and that’s not the way you go about doing these
things.” So yes, it was very much thoroughly debunked as for if there’s
still belief in it these days, I don’t know a lot about the contemporary scene,
but I would be very surprised if there was strongholds anywhere within the
scientific discipline.
I will qualify this by saying that doesn’t mean that those
behaviors aren’t part of the complex system, right? So you can identify male
hierarchies and yes, there are aggressions and there is controlling behaviors,
but that’s only one part of a much more complex overall view.
Riddell: I think that’s pretty impressive actually that Irven DeVore
was magnanimous enough to say I was wrong.
Greenwood: Yes. And he said that it was conversations with his female
colleagues that really pushed him on his theories and his thinking that changed
his mind. So I think that’s interesting.
Riddell: Samara, in the recent issue of The New Yorker,
interestingly, I read something that seemed relevant to our conversation. It’s
an article by Charles Bethea, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker and he’s
writing an article on camps for men where they crawl through mud and carry
heavy objects and desire to be more manly and more formidable and perhaps
unsurprisingly the word alpha male gets mentioned a lot. I’m actually going to
read you this little paragraph because I thought this was interesting and I happened
to be reading it right at the same time as we were about to talk. In 1982, Frans
De Waal book, Chimpanzee Politics helped popularize the term alpha male. The
book is an account of power struggles within a colony of male chimps at a zoo
in the Netherlands. De Waal, a Dutch primatologist who taught at Emory
challenged a number of assumptions about non-human primates.
He noticed that the leaders of the chimps he studied were
not necessarily the strongest or the most intimidating, but rather the ones who
excelled at coalition building. They kept the peace impartially often by
protecting underdogs when conflicts arose. De Waal called his alphas the
consolers in chief. It’s not clear how closely people read the book. In the
’90s, Newt Gingrich handed out copies to freshman congressmen. After that, the
term alpha male became very popular, De Waal explained in a TED Talk. On the
internet, you will find all these business books that tell you how to be an
alpha male and what they mean by an alpha male is how to beat up others and
beat them over the head and let them know that you are the boss and don’t mess
with me and so on. And basically an alpha male for them is a bully, which
obviously was not what Dr. De Waal had observed and reported.
And I just wondered what your take on that is to the degree
that there is a leader, that the successful ones are good at restoring the
peace and keeping the colony functioning well. Just any thoughts that you have
on why it is that our sense of the alpha male or the leader is the biggest,
baddest and in some ways the worst.
Greenwood: Yes. I think Frans De Waal’s research is fabulous and he’s
done other research where he’s looked at often there’s so much interest in when
a conflict happens, like how the conflict happens within a primate society,
which doesn’t happen that often, let’s just say that as well. And what he
started to study was, well, okay, what happens after a conflict? And what he
found that there was a whole lot of behaviors that were about recovering from
conflict. So what do the primates do to come back together to become friends
and allies again after conflict? And this is an important part of the story. I
think what often gets missed out is there tends to be this monofocus on a
particular minor aspect of behavior for whatever reason and all of these other
really important behaviors, yes, they might be more subtle to see, but they
dominate in terms of amount of time and amount of effort if you’re looking at
all of the behaviors.
And so the upshot is that I think yes, this more complex
story is more accurate than when we narrow our focus and only look at certain
behaviors and draw them out as being key like so often happens in that kind of
public alpha male story, which just really doesn’t have any basis as far as I
can tell in the science itself in animal behavior studies. Why does this story
keep persisting?
Surely there’s a whole lot of reasons. It’s not an area of
study I do and if I was studying it, I feel like that would be a whole PhD in
itself. But off the top of my head or things that I have considered are one
interesting thing that I do know from the history is that that military model
of primate behavior, that was actually taught in middle schools. So Irven DeVore
was part of the system that in the 1960s set up this study of main American
middle schools and was rolled out across the board and it was really the
description there are very much about this traditional idea of an alpha male as
sort of a military kind of leader. A whole generation got indoctrinated into
that kind of thinking. So it’s really pervasive. You then see it repeated in
films and in television. So the social environment reinforced it for a very
long time and you don’t see any of that kind of thing happening with this newer
story, with this corrective story that is about this more complexity.
And even when you do, like as you said with Frans of all’s
book, when it is spelled out in a public book, still only certain pieces are
picked out and kind of focused on. It’s a sticky idea. Why is it a sticky idea?
I think other people might need to answer that. I think that’s beyond me, but
it does seem that alpha male as this, as you said, as a bully, just seems like
a very sticky thing that’s very hard to break.
Riddell: It really does. Was Irven DeVore in the UK or the United
States or where were children being educated in those ideas?
Greenwood: That was across the US. Across. And there was films. He’d done films
of aggressive baboon behavior, again, a small part of the whole picture and
that was part of this. So it was visuals, it was audio. He had a model of how
he imagined. He said he’d seen this model of how primate societies were
constructed with the lead males in the center and all the peripheral members
around the outside always describing the females as peripheral or secondary and
in need of protection. And this became a very quite strong kind of model, this
picture. But then you have studies again and again coming after it, debunking
it going, “This is not observable in nature at all. Where is it? ”
You’re seeing females in every one of those positions. You’re seeing females
leading the group. How did this come up? It seems to have come from some sort
of pre-ideas about what was expected to be seen as opposed to what was actually
seen out in the wild.
Riddell: Or they were hoping to see. I mean, the term alpha female
existed too, but it’s never had the same traction as alpha male.
Greenwood: Yeah. I do think alpha in itself is a terrible, terrible
term. If we can start to talk about leading individuals, I think it starts to
soften the way that we’re talking about it. A leading individual has more
capacity in our imaginations to encompass some of those things you were talking
about, that cooperation, that protection of those that are in less strong
positions, all of those kind of things we are starting to take on board that
that’s what true leadership is. When you put the word alpha in there, I don’t
know, the whole conversation changes.
Riddell: Well, and then in the manosphere, there’s a lot of talk
about Beta Boys as in the second and the lesser. I am a writer and we know that
in stories it’s very, very helpful to have a single hero. More people will read
the story, more people will pick up the book in the first place and we’ll keep
reading it. Every movie basically is around a single hero. There does seem to
be something about the human brain that’s better able to track the trajectory
of a single individual rather than a collective.
Greenwood: I also wonder if it’s just like a story, again, like a
narrative type that can be shifted. We’ve just so often been geared towards the
goodie and the baddie, right? The hero and the evil, this is real binary.
Perhaps we can evolve. Perhaps we can change to see different kinds of stories
as being truer and more interesting as well. I certainly do.
Riddell: I like that. Now, how can you and I and our listeners mount
a campaign to less the hold on our imagination that the alpha male story still
commands?
Greenwood: So this is something I have occasionally tried to imagine,
but I can’t claim to have any grand plan. This is beyond kind of my expertise,
but my intuition is if this story is going to loosen its grip, it’s unlikely to
happen through academic arguments alone where as much as we do great academic
arguments, it is a struggle to convince beyond sort of small groups of people.
I do think it would need to be taken up in popular culture, right? Those films,
those documentaries, even TikTok, once it starts to spread this sort of
alternate, more complex, I think more interesting story, as well as it’s more
accurate, right, that’s maybe when we can start to break down the old story
because we’ve got something new that is more interesting and more captivating.
Maybe one particularly captivating way to do that would be to tell the story of
the scientists It’s like I’m doing, especially the women who helped expose the
limits of that older model and opened up a richer understanding of primate
social life. You’ve got a story where there are some heroes in there, but
it’s not an old style kind of story.
Riddell: I do think it’s possible that Gen Z has more of that
knowledge of the importance of groups and community and have been raised in a
different way where that model of the dominant male has lost some of its power.
Greenwood: I think so too. It’s certainly my experience. I’ve got two
daughters that certainly seem along that track, but it does seem, as we’re
seeing with the manosphere, that there are niches where some of these old ideas
are really not only just being perpetuated, but being accelerated. So that’s
challenging.
Riddell: Yeah.
Greenwood: If we were successful, what might change? That was, I think,
your other part of the question.
Riddell: Yeah. So if we did succeed at this, if you and I come with a
great campaign and the listeners get all excited about it and want to really
make a change in this arena, what do you think might shift?
Greenwood: That’s really important to think about. I think we
underestimate how much the stories that we tell about nature become the stories
we tell about ourselves. Whether it’s right or wrong, there’s a strong
connection about how we imagine nature and how we imagine ourselves. Hence why
how we imagine primates, non-human primates, and how that relates to primates.
So if we loosen the hold of that alpha male myth, we might also loosen some of
the assumptions that we make about aggression, domination and control, which
currently kind of seem natural, inevitable, and admirable to changing that to
something else, to seeing them as a more minor part of a broader spectrum of
behaviors. That could open up more space for people to think differently about
masculinity, leadership, cooperation, and social life. We would have a more
accurate picture of the natural world and that seems like a good place to
start.
Riddell: Well, it really does. Even when you just think logically
about the natural world, even without firsthand observation, it makes sense
that an organism is not going to deliberately put himself or herself in
jeopardy. So I think that our idea that the alpha male is always looking for a
fight is something that’s held by people who’ve never been in a fight and have
never been punched. Nobody wants to get hurt unnecessarily. It’s a real risk to
enter into a battle. So it makes a lot of sense that these animals would have
the capacity to try to create peace in the group and to try to have the group
function smoothly the way Frans de Waal described it.
Greenwood: Exactly right. And it’s not just about the individual. Part
of any social group is the good of the whole, right? The good of the whole
means the good of the self. Once the whole breaks down, then you’re much more
vulnerable. So yes, there’s a logic here, right? So it’s much more logical,
this contemporary kind of view than the old view and yet the old view still
sticks around.
Riddell: Right. I mean, we care about our own self-interest. So if
you’d commit an action that makes somebody else perceive you as a bully, the
other person who sees you as a bully may well be plotting revenge. So it’s a
big risk.
Greenwood: Yeah. And you can see how that starts to break down all of
those bonds that keep a social group together. And when you’re looking at, say,
baboons or any other monkeys and apes out in the wild, that’s really important
to their survival is keeping that group safe and bonded and functioning
properly, as you say.
Riddell: Right. And it’s a lot of work to keep a group cohesive and
it is natural for things to gradually break down over time and to have a long
surviving troop of chimpanzees has got to be relatively unusual, I would think.
I mean, it takes work to do it, I guess is what I’m saying.
Greenwood: That’s right.
Riddell: So you’ve been studying the people who study primates and
thinking about them a lot. Has that changed the way you see us, the way you see
your human friends or your colleagues? Or if you pass by one of the beautiful
city parks in Melbourne and you see a group of people playing, do you ever have
this sudden image of us as the apes that we all actually are?
Greenwood: What a cute question. I actually think it’s a little bit in
reverse. By learning about the complexity of non-human primate societies, I now
look at monkeys differently. I’m like, wow. If you just do some sort of casual
observation, even at a zoo, you’re just noticing little bits of behaviors. But
now that I understand some of the systematics behind their social behavior, I’m
fascinated by when you do observe them, how that actually plays out. And I
guess therefore the reverse, seeing some more of our complex human interactions
in the primate world. So yeah, I think opened my eyes has been in the reverse
direction.
Riddell: So even though you weren’t crazy about monkeys as a kid, now
you love to see them.
Greenwood: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I do remember some of the people
I interviewed as part of my research when they first started even entering into
primatology in say the 1950s or the 1960s said the first big surprise for them
was that primates had a society, that concept that there is a society amongst
primate social groups was just mind blowing. And I’m like, “I can totally
see that. ” That is a really interesting insight.
Riddell: One thing that I think is a step forward is that when Darwin
first posited the idea that we were related to apes, that was widely rejected
and considered very offensive to humans. And I do think that most people
understand now that we are cousins, that we are related and I do think that’s a
step forward.
Greenwood: Yeah, certainly.
Riddell: Do you have a life philosophy or any basic tenets or a motto
that you repeat to sort of help keep you going and on your track to finish your
dissertation and on your track to be present in the world and the way that you
want to be?
Greenwood: Yeah. I do really like that quote by Ivan Ilick who was an
Austrian theologian and philosopher, which says that if we want to change
society for the better, we need to tell a more powerful story. And as he put
it, one that kind of sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story,
one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and our present into
a coherent whole and on that even shin some light into the future so that we
can take the next step. So it’s one that when I first read this probably 20
years ago really just resonated really deeply with me because it gives you a
sense not only how can we make some positive change in the world, let’s do our
part in making this story, but it also tells us something about having to test
our own assumptions to go, okay, something about our current story.
If things aren’t working well, then something about what
we’re telling ourselves now is wrong. What is that? Identifying that, trying to
come up, do the research. Part of what I love about academia is actually
getting to do the research and see what it tells us about building this better
story.
Riddell: Yes. Samara, is it possible that those women critiquing
primatology at that time might turn out in the future to actually be wrong,
that someone will gather fresh data and prove the fallacy of their views the
same way that they proved wrong the men who came before them?
Greenwood: So I get asked this question a lot and it’s one that has
gone on in my head quite a bit because I know there’s something we’re not
thinking through quite correctly when we ask this question. I’m going to try
and articulate what I think it is. When we talk about sort of masculinism and
feminism, they feel like they’re mirror images of each other or that you’re
just replacing male bias with female bias. But what we need to realize is that
the two cases aren’t the same. They’re not parallel. The earlier male bias
perspective involved a genuine blind spot, right? It had a very narrow view
where researchers were assuming sort of going into the field assuming that
female primates were passive and secondary by default while males were assumed
to be the natural center of social life almost as a foregone conclusion and
that assumption was allowed to persist even when there was already evidence
that pointed beyond it.
Now the feminist intervention was not about installing some
opposing female centric view that cut out the male behavior, right? So it’s not
just the flip. Instead, it was about making that blind spot visible,
highlighting it as a problem and about taking seriously evidence that had
previously been overlooked or downplayed. So rather than narrowing the field to
just half the story that had happened previously as in the case of male bias,
what their job was to open it up to the fuller story to include all of this
information that was being sort of downplayed or disregarded. And this in turn
made it more difficult for future researchers to blindly ignore female agency
variation in sex roles and the complexity of primate social life. Now, could
some of those feminist interpretations later be revised? Absolutely. That’s
true of any scientific claim, right? But that revision of their sort of first
pass at what this new thing would look like, that’s not the same as saying that
they were just another bias.
Their major contribution was to reveal a hidden distortion
in that earlier work and to provide ways of remedying that structural, deep
structural problem. So even as they undoubtedly had limitations of their own
and there are certainly future assumptions and current assumptions that still
need to be challenged that does not cancel out the fact that they brought about
an important and positive shift at that time.
Riddell: You know what it’s making me think of as you say that? I’m
thinking about stories and books that are written as a series and the first
book actually is pretty minimalist and you really do only get to meet one
character and maybe two friends and some other minor characters and that as the
series progresses, they always start to populate it with more and more people,
people in more complex roles and more complex relationships. And it’s almost as
though when the science was being written, there was a very bare bones
narrative. They chose one that was relatively convenient for the people that
were doing the research and appeared obvious to them and that complexity and
the value of the connections among the various players in that group of
primates only comes with time and more looking and deeper understanding as
things progress.
Greenwood: I think that’s part of it, but as you mentioned before, we
have the Japanese studying at exactly the same time and they are engaging in
much more complex theorizing from the start. You definitely develop a more
complex understanding over time, but part of it is the position that you’re
starting from. So what are the assumptions you’re bringing to that study? And
if you begin with a background assumption that it’s going to be complex and
that you need to study all of the individuals, not just half of them in a
serious equal kind of fashion, then you’re going to immediately get a different
result. One of the analogies that I quite like is that you could compare it to
looking at something with just one eye. So you’ve got a hand over one eye and
you try to describe it with just one eye and then someone goes, “Hang on,
you’re going to get a much deeper field of vision if you look with both
eyes.” And that’s what these feminist scientists were doing.
They’re going, “If you look with one eye, you’re going
to get the wrong idea. You’re going to really distort the picture. Open up this
other eye and you’re going to see things much more clearly.” So I think
that was the major transition.
Riddell: That’s beautifully put. And I’m also just thinking too about
the value of coming into some sort of a research opportunity with the desire to
be able to study all the individual organisms rather than just looking at ones
that appear flashy or interesting and trying to make a lot of judgments based
on a very small population sample.
Greenwood: Yeah. And that correlates to the other big change that
happened, which was that when they first started studying, they were really
interested in old world monkeys and apes, so sort of African, larger kind of
animals. And then when different groups started studying primates from
different parts of Asia, from different parts of South America, the story just
blossomed into much more complexity. You found different primate species were
doing very, very different things. And so that challenged that core idea as well.
So yes, very much what you’re taking as your subject, what you even just choose
to look at can affect the whole sort of system.
Riddell: Samara, this has been amazing. I feel like I’ve learned so
much. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Greenwood: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a delight.
Riddell: The Shape of the World is about nature, cities, and people
and the world we share. It’s a production of the Office of Modern Composition,
a business that coaches writers and helps people and organizations tell their
stories. If you have something you’re trying to write, the Office of Modern
Composition can help. The Shape of the World is produced in the vital,
vigorous, and beautiful metropolis of Chicago and the Prairie State of
Illinois. The shape of the world is a completely carbon neutral endeavor thanks
to reductions we made and from a carbon offset purchased from Tradewater. If
you’re interested in eliminating your carbon footprint, go to the website
tradewater.us. You can find Shape of the World on Instagram and Facebook and on
our own website, shapeoftheworldshow.com. There you’ll find out more about
Samara Greenwood and you’ll also find a drawing of Samara made by the artist,
Olivia Cohen. This episode of The Shape of the World was produced by Max
Hatlam. Our theme music was composed by Brad Wood. We are only three episodes
into our seventh season, so you can expect another brand new episode to come
out very soon. Thanks for listening.
