Power

The common loon. Photo by Lawrence Sawyer/Getty

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power … We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end … The object of power is power. 

– Nineteen Eighty-Four/George Orwell

Different applications of power exist everywhere, whether it be dominant males mating with females, like seals, for example, to pass their DNA to future generations by brute force or by subterfuge when smaller male cuttlefish camouflage themselves as females to do the same thing with exquisite subtly as the kind of power expressed takes on whatever form needed to meet the objective in question.

Animals don’t relinquish power once they get it either. But for nonhumans, power is always a means to an end. Many ends, in fact, including food, mates and shelter. Attaining and then maintaining power – defined as the ability to direct, control, or influence the behaviour of other creatures or resources – lies at the heart of almost all animal societies.

The quest for power in nonhumans has been of interest since the days of Charles Darwin. Thomas Henry Huxley, whom Darwin called ‘my good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel, ie the Devil’s gospel’ didn’t mince words when it came to power in the animal kingdom. In Huxley’s essay The Struggle for Existence: A Programme (1888), Darwin’s prolocutor said that the animal world was equivalent to a ‘gladiator’s show’, at least as far as a moralist would be concerned:

The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given … the weakest and the stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and the shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their circumstances, but not the best in any other sense, survived.

More recently, animal behaviourists have come to recognise these more subtle ways that animals seek power over those around them. Being the ‘toughest’ is only a part of the picture – ‘shrewdest’ matters a lot too. Animals spy on rivals for power, display power in different ways depending on their audience, form coalitions to rise in rank, and camouflage themselves to climb the power ladder. All of this is completely reshaping how we think about nonhuman power struggles. New research provides a fresh window into the emergence of sociality, and takes us a step closer to an integrated and conceptually powerful model of the evolution of power.

Male and female southern elephant seal

Smarts matters. :)