Jordan Peterson and that Damned Lobster

Knowing our level on the social ladder is an ancient trait — but the ladder doesn’t have to be extremely high.

The blue ‘Lamington crayfish’, which wanders around rainforests in Queensland, Australia. Crayfish are freshwater creatures while lobsters live in saltwater. I’d hazard a guess that crayfish have dominance issues, just like lobsters…. Photo: the author (Mike Pole).

You might have heard of ‘that lobster’ by now — it plays a central part in Jordan Peterson’s book, ‘12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos’. Peterson starts off his ‘Rule 1’ by discussing lobsters and territory. Lobsters fight for territory — and this results in winners and losers. There are significant consequences for defeated lobsters — their chemistry and brain changes, they lose confidence, and even their posture reflects their lowly social status.

Peterson’s lobster seems to have taken on a life of it’s own, with Jordan being ridiculed for having a “fixation” on lobsters, by drawing “laughable” comparisons between human hierarchical structures and those of lobsters, but, trumping all that…. the lobster ending up on T-shirts.

As a scientist with a biological/palaeontological bent, I think I ‘got’ the lobster thing immediately. The smart move that Peterson made was to identify a creature that demonstrated dominance hierarchy behaviour — and which branched off from us in an evolutionary sense (lobsters are arthropods), a long, long time back. By highlighting dominance hierarchy on such a deep branch of the evolutionary tree, Peterson is…