After reading Darwin's theory on sexual selection, I was reminded of an interesting phenomenon I read about once, that seems to deviate from the general form of superior and inferior classes being "subconsciously" identified within particular species.
Basically what happens in this lizard species is that there are three different types of male, characterized by their color, size and mating tendencies. Each type will win out in a contest for mating against one of the other classes, but will also lose to the final group.
Here is the Nature article:
http://www.indiana.edu/~curtweb/L567/readings/Sinervo&Lively1996.pdf
And since this article is relatively dense, here is the wikipedia page describing the phenomenon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_side-blotched_lizard
I'm a little intrigued as to how a "game" like this develops in a species (it's also been discovered in a certain type of bacteria), and how it might eventually end, especially since the authors noticed that there are fluctuations in group population size but these were eventually be corrected, yielding a cyclic model.
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