Tag Archive for: the second myth

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The Alpha Wolf Is a Lie (Even the Guy Who Coined It Says So)

In a wolf pack, the story goes, there’s an alpha: the strongest male, who fought his way to the top while everyone else fell in line. The loser rolls over and shows his belly. The winner eats first. From that one picture we got a whole vocabulary (alpha, beta, dominant, submissive) and a pile of self-help, dating advice and dog training built on top of it.

The picture is wrong. But the correction you’ve probably heard since, “wolf packs are just peaceful families and dominance is a myth,” is wrong too, and in a direction that flatters the people who repeat it.

Where the alpha wolf came from: a zoo

The idea traces back to Swiss animal behaviorist Rudolph Schenkel, who studied wolves at the Basel Zoo and published his findings in 1947. These weren’t wild wolves. They were unrelated adults, basically strangers, living together in an enclosure. And strangers forced together compete for position. Schenkel saw tension, rivalries and a top wolf, and he called it the alpha.

It’s a bit like studying people during a prison riot and deciding that’s how families work.

The idea went mainstream through The Wolf, a 1970 book by wolf biologist L. David Mech. It was a landmark book, and it put “alpha wolf” into popular culture.

The scientist who took it back

Mech then spent decades studying wild wolves, including summers on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian high Arctic, watching a pack so unused to people that it mostly ignored him. What he saw wasn’t a gang of rivals fighting for a throne. It was a family.

A typical wild pack is a breeding pair and their offspring from the past two or three years, often around six to ten wolves. The so-called alphas are simply the parents. They lead because they’re the parents, not because they won a fight. When the young wolves reach two or three years old, they usually leave to find mates and start packs of their own.

In a 1999 paper in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, Mech called the “top dog” picture “particularly misleading.” As he has put it, what would be the value of calling a human father “the alpha male”? He pushed for years to get his own book taken out of print, and in 2022 it finally was.

The second myth: “dominance in wolves is fake”

Here’s where the popular correction overshoots. Mech never said dominance doesn’t exist. He said the cartoon version, a wolf fighting unrelated rivals to become top dog, doesn’t describe wild packs.

Dominance in wolves is real. It’s just situational, more like a parent correcting a maturing pup than a king holding a crown. In 2010, Mech described watching an adult wolf pin another to the ground for about six and a half minutes.

Even “it’s always just Mom, Dad and the kids” is a little too tidy. In Yellowstone, the Druid Peak pack grew to 37 wolves in 2001. When a territory gets crowded, leaving home gets dangerous, so grown offspring stay longer, and some packs end up with more than one breeding pair. Wolves are families. Families get complicated.

How the myth got into your living room

The captive-wolf picture didn’t stay in zoology. In 1978, How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend, a popular training book by the Monks of New Skete, taught owners the “alpha roll”: when a dog misbehaves, flip it on its back and pin it, the way a lead wolf supposedly would. A whole generation of owners tried it.

That isn’t how wild wolves run a family. Mech calls the real behavior “pinning,” and it’s situational, not a discipline routine. By their 2002 edition, the monks had dropped the technique themselves, calling it too risky and demanding for the average dog owner.

The thing to take with you

Notice what the myth and the correction have in common. Both turned wolves into a mirror. “Be the alpha” gave people permission to dominate. “Alphas aren’t real” gave people permission to believe dominance is always fake and always bad. Neither group was really talking about wolves.

And the one piece of the story people built a whole personality around, strangers fighting for rank in an enclosure, is the one piece that never described wild wolves at all.

So when a correction makes you feel smarter, calmer or more enlightened than the people who still believe the myth, stop and ask: does this version flatter me? The version that flatters you is the one you’ll stop checking.

Questions people ask

Is the alpha wolf a myth?

Mostly. The idea of an alpha fighting rivals for control came from 1940s observations of unrelated wolves in captivity. In the wild, packs are usually families, and the leaders are the breeding parents.

Who came up with the alpha wolf idea?

Swiss behaviorist Rudolph Schenkel described it in 1947 from wolves at the Basel Zoo. Wolf biologist David Mech made it famous in his 1970 book, then spent decades correcting it.

Do wolves have a hierarchy?

Yes, but it’s family-based and situational. Pack members defer to the breeding parents, and dominance shows up in specific moments, not as a constant fight for rank.

What is the alpha roll, and does it work?

The alpha roll means pinning a dog on its back to assert dominance. The Monks of New Skete popularized it in 1978 and dropped it in their 2002 edition as too risky. It doesn’t reflect how wild wolves behave.

How big is a wolf pack?

Often around six to ten wolves: a breeding pair and their offspring from the past two or three years. Packs can grow much larger, like Yellowstone’s Druid Peak pack, which reached 37 wolves in 2001.

Sources

  • Schenkel, R. (1947). Expression studies on wolves. Behaviour 1, 81–129.
  • Mech, L. D. (1970). The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species. Natural History Press.
  • Mech, L. D. (1999). Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs. Canadian Journal of Zoology 77(8), 1196–1203.
  • Scientific American. Is the Alpha Wolf Idea a Myth?
  • International Wolf Center. International Wolf, Summer 2020.
  • Science Friday. The Alpha Wolf Myth.
  • Monks of New Skete (1978; 2nd ed. 2002). How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend.
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Everyone’s Wrong About the Flat Earth. Twice.

You know the story. Before 1492, everybody thought the Earth was flat, and if you sailed far enough west you’d drop right off the edge. Then brave Christopher Columbus ignored the Church and the scholars, sailed anyway, and proved them all wrong.

Almost none of that is true. And the smart-sounding correction most people learn next, “actually, everyone knew the Earth was round,” is only the first layer. There are two more myths underneath it.

Myth one: medieval people thought the Earth was flat

They didn’t. Educated people knew the Earth was round more than a thousand years before Columbus.

Around 240 BC, a Greek scholar named Eratosthenes didn’t just believe the Earth was round. He measured it. At noon on the summer solstice, the Sun stood straight overhead in the Egyptian city of Syene, and a vertical stick cast no shadow. At the same moment in Alexandria, farther north, a stick cast a shadow at about seven degrees, roughly one-fiftieth of a circle. So the distance between the two cities was about one-fiftieth of the way around the planet. Multiply by fifty and you have the whole Earth. Depending on how you convert his units, he came within a few percent of the real number.

That knowledge never went away. Medieval scholars wrote about a round Earth, and sailors watched ships disappear hull-first over the curve of the horizon. By Columbus’s time, the round Earth was old, settled science.

So the correction is true. But stopping there skips the only question that matters: if nobody believed it, where did the flat-Earth story come from?

Myth two: the story came down from the Middle Ages

It didn’t. It was popularized in the 1800s, and it was useful to the people who spread it.

In 1828, Washington Irving, the author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, published a hugely popular biography of Columbus. The real story of Columbus hunting for funding was fairly dull, so Irving added drama: a scene where Columbus faces down a council of ignorant churchmen who insist the world is flat. It’s a great scene. It’s also largely fiction.

It might have stayed a colorful exaggeration. But in the late 1800s, writers arguing that religion had always been at war with science needed an example of the Church crushing the truth, and the flat Earth was perfect. Two books did most of the work: John William Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). By the twentieth century, the story was in classrooms everywhere. Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, who traced how it spread, called it “the Flat Error.”

Myth three: Columbus was the visionary who was right

Here’s the twist inside the twist. There really was an argument about Columbus’s voyage. It just wasn’t about the shape of the Earth. It was about its size.

Columbus thought the Earth was about a quarter smaller than it really is. He leaned on a map associated with the Florentine scholar Toscanelli that shrank the ocean and, of course, showed no Americas. By his math, Asia was roughly 4,000 kilometers west of Europe. The real distance is more than 20,000.

The experts who reviewed his plan in Portugal and Spain told him so: his numbers were wrong, the ocean was enormous, and no ship of the time could carry enough food and water to cross it. They were right. Columbus survived because two continents nobody in Europe knew about happened to sit right where he would have run out of ocean.

So the brave visionary who was right when everyone else was wrong? He was wrong. The experts who doubted him? Correct. And the flat Earth they supposedly believed in? They never did.

The thing to take with you

When a story is this tidy (a lone genius, a world of fools, a clear villain), ask one question: who benefits from me believing this? The flat-Earth myth made the past look stupid and the present look brilliant, and it handed one side of a 19th-century argument a ready-made weapon. It wasn’t an accident. It was useful.

Feeling smarter than the past is a great feeling. Any time a story hands you that feeling for free, somebody is getting something out of it.

Questions people ask

Did people in the Middle Ages think the Earth was flat?

No. Educated Europeans accepted a round Earth throughout the Middle Ages. The Greeks had established it centuries earlier, and around 240 BC Eratosthenes measured the planet’s circumference to within a few percent.

Did Columbus prove the Earth was round?

No. Educated people already knew it was round. The real dispute was about the Earth’s size. Columbus thought it was about a quarter smaller than it is, and the experts who doubted his plan were right.

Who started the myth that medieval people believed in a flat Earth?

It was popularized in the 1800s, starting with a dramatic scene Washington Irving wrote into his 1828 biography of Columbus. Books by John William Draper (1874) and Andrew Dickson White (1896) then spread it as fact.

How did Eratosthenes measure the Earth?

He compared noon shadows in two Egyptian cities on the summer solstice. The shadow angle in Alexandria was about seven degrees, roughly one-fiftieth of a circle, so he multiplied the distance between the cities by fifty.

Why did experts reject Columbus’s plan?

Because his distance estimate was far too small. They argued, correctly, that the ocean between Europe and Asia was too wide for the ships of the time to cross without resupply.

Sources

  • Russell, J. B. (1991). Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians. Praeger.
  • Irving, W. (1828). A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.
  • Draper, J. W. (1874). History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science.
  • White, A. D. (1896). A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.
  • Vatican Observatory. Washington Irving’s Columbus and the Flat Earth.
  • Encyclopedia.com. Eratosthenes of Cyrene.
  • Wikipedia. Myth of the flat Earth.
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