Dominance Displays: The Biology of Art, Pride—and Materialism

Abstract

Although overt aggression is the ultimate means of forcing access to scarce resources essential to reproduction, it is a costly and dangerous means. It not only uses precious energy and nutrients at a very high rate, but also risks the loss of dominance, wounding and secondary infections, as well as death of the aggressor. In some situations overt aggression would be futile. Thus the minimum number of agonistic interactions increases exponentially with group size, in order to have a dominance hierarchy based on individual recognition (x = (n ² − n)/2, where x = number of fights, n = size of group). Clearly, one soon reaches a group size in which individuals do little more than fight. The laws of least effort and maintenance of homeostasis dictate that a cheaper means than fighting be found which has the same effects, but not the same consequences, as overt aggression. The same argument applies to agonistic behavior in large-bodied, long-lived species, as compared to small-bodied, short-lived ones, or K-selected against r-selected species (Geist 1974a). If the reproductive effort of individuals must be spaced over very long periods of time, then overt fighting will be reduced to a minimum per unit of time and replaced by a cheaper substitute. The cheaper substitute for overt aggression can be identified as the diverse showy, and very common, dominance displays and the strategies with which these displays are used; in our own species these displays appear to be the root of art and pride, maybe of culture itself. That displays save energy was suggested quite early in the study of animal behavior (Collias 1944), but I am not aware that this has been verified to date.