Alpha male death rate and war's effect on society
I am deciding wether to spend any time on a project to look at the relationship between wars, or periods of war, and societal change from the assumption that are best, most alpha type males are the ones who bear the largest burden of casualties. Might not be a water tight hypothesis, but it explains France.
Anyone heard of a similar study or have ideas on where/methodolgies of research? Its pretty subjective, I know. I would be grateful for thoughts.
Regards.
As a confirmed and documaneted type Z personality
who blames Type As for many ills of the world -- while acknowledging they are sometimes needed -- I think that would be interesting. I also think Fuchs is correct, it's probably going to be almost impossible to accrue meaningful data in sufficient quantity. Maybe not...
Good luck.
Have you read any of the studies using the Scottish Mental Surveys of 1932
as the dataset? From the abstract of Corley, Crang, and Deary’s 2009 article:
Quote:
Male soldiers with a higher childhood IQ had a slightly increased risk of dying during active service in WWII. Men who did not join the Army had a higher IQ than men who did. Further research in this area should consider naval and air force personnel records in order to examine more fully the complex relationship between IQ and survival expectancy during active service in WWII.
Scarcity of imperical data
Goes in my favor these days, as the man said any editorial in the Times - or anywhere else for that matter - states wild claims with no proof.
Your thoughts are very helpful in forming this thought.
I am intrigued by the obvious dog pack conclusion that no alphas means betas become alphas. I will have to address that. I suppose that betas become alphas in relation to their own pack, but war implies the standard is interpack instead of intrapack. So the definition of "alpha" needs to be clear. I should like to make the claim based on the common understanding of manly honor and duty, sadly not so common; and thus my search for a cause, which led me to this hypothesis.
France is a good test, not least for an excuse to visit and do research there. Mostly because for centuries she held herself up, and was held up by others, as the martial state which typified the warrior caste. Forgive my antiquatedness but I equate that to manliness, in the virtue sense of the word. Maybe she has not lost her manly attributes.
In that same vein, Japan is an interesting study in the apprent collapse of bushido after WWII, maybe some link there.
I would postulate that whatever our current social -ism is, it is distinctly not manly (lack of desire to breed, inclusiveness to the point of submission, risk adverse malaise) in most societies being a product of our current culture and there I may be wrong. Of course that makes my whole arguement specious and a great many of my long held beliefs irrelevant so I'll take it as true and drive on for the sake of arguement.
The metadata is daunting. Perhaps it should be stated at the outset that all evidence is anecdotal. Probably never going to be Phd grade research anyhow. As I said, a good excuse to visit wine country.