Wrong Lobster, Wrong Lesson

Popular arguments often lean on animal metaphors to justify human social hierarchies. But spiny lobsters—close cousins of Peterson’s American lobster—use similar hormone signaling to coordinate cooperative 'rosettes' and 'phalanxes' against predators, not to dominate each other. Picking the 'right' species can flip the moral you draw from nature. — It warns that political or cultural claims grounded in biology can be selectively framed, pushing readers and policymakers to scrutinize which models from nature we choose to generalize from.