I worry that it’s way too easy to overgeneralize the roles we’re talking about. The fact that pigeons have a different flight leader than food dominator does _not_ imply that one is the decision-maker and the other is the highest status. It only implies that the social organization for different activities can be different (still a very important observation).
One possible important distinction is how rivalrous the decision topic is. “who gets to eat this” is not just a different decision, but a different type of decision than “how high should we fly in order not to tire before we reach our destination”.
And since humans went and invented language and self-modeling, now you get both the strongest and the best navigators trying to convince each other that the two are related.
I worry that it’s way too easy to overgeneralize the roles we’re talking about. The fact that pigeons have a different flight leader than food dominator does _not_ imply that one is the decision-maker and the other is the highest status. It only implies that the social organization for different activities can be different (still a very important observation).
One possible important distinction is how rivalrous the decision topic is. “who gets to eat this” is not just a different decision, but a different type of decision than “how high should we fly in order not to tire before we reach our destination”.
And since humans went and invented language and self-modeling, now you get both the strongest and the best navigators trying to convince each other that the two are related.