Jim Clark was 38 when he set out to reinvent himself. He had just lost his job as a professor at the New York Institute of Technology, and his second wife had left him. Describing this low point to Michael Lewis, author of The New New Thing, Clark says he was suddenly possessed with "a maniacal passion . . . to achieve something." And he did: In the years since then, Clark, now 55, has created three multibillion-dollar computer companies, including Netscape. In the process he has made himself and the people around him unbelievably rich.
But how? What does it take to become a dominant individual in human society? How do we identify our alpha males and females and decide to give them our allegiance? Our would-be leaders don’t butt heads like rival elk. They don’t signal their ascent from beta to alpha status by turning bright blue, as do males from one species of African cichlid fish.
Dominance is almost invisible in human affairs and yet arguably present everywhere. Pay attention and you can see it in the stir that runs through a room when a pretty or powerful woman enters, or in the body language of a man running into his boss at the shopping mall. In such situations, humans invariably size one another up as quickly and ruthlessly as grade schoolers choosing sides in a pickup basketball game. Every time two people meet, some scientists say, the question of dominance or submission gets answered in the way one person holds eye contact and the other glances away, or in the way one unconsciously shifts vocal tone to match the other. Trying to figure out who’s in charge is almost as natural for us as breathing.
But does a term like alpha male, coined in 1935 to describe the leader of a wolf pack, make any sense in a human context? Does dominance itself, a concept first put forward early in the twentieth century by a Norwegian researcher studying chickens, have anything to do with human society? Do we really have pecking orders?
Unlike animals, we don’t generally spend the bulk of our lives in a single herd or pack. We move routinely from one hierarchy to another, from vice president of operations to anxious newcomer in the PTA, from assistant librarian to head of the local soup kitchen, from alpha to omega and back again, all in the course of a day, or even an hour.
