The Role of Hierarchies in the Biosphere

A Harvard professor told me i shouldn't use the term dominance hierarchy. He said it's not obvious that hierarchies are predicated on dominance exactly hierarchies exist but whether or not they're dominance hierarchies is a whole different story. I thought god i don't want to hear that i've been using the idea of dominance hierarchy for like 20 years and so i was annoyed at him for like a month while i was rethinking this through. Then i stumbled across the phrase competence hierarchy and i thought oh that's much better  and you see this in other animals too this competence hierarchy. So there's these cool birds you could look them up if you if you want to look up a