From lizard individualism (https://phys.org/news/2026-11-male-lizard-perfumes-rivalry-seduction.html):
QuoteMales produce waxy secretions from glands on their hindlimbs and deposit them on rocks and other surfaces as they move through their environment. These scent marks contain dozens of chemical compounds.
Rather than finding strong evidence that the compounds we studied help males attract females, we found that scent chemistry was more closely connected to competition among males and territorial dominance.
This explains the fiction-absolute (https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/tom-wolfe-biography):
QuoteI take that term, the human beast, from my idol, Emile Zola, who published a novel entitled The Human Beast in 1888, just 29 years after Darwin's The Origin of Species broke the stunning news that Homo sapiens--or Homo loquax, as I call him--was not created by God in his own image but was precisely that, a beast, not different in any essential way from snakes with fangs or orangutangs . . . or kangaroos. . . or the fang-proof mongoose. Darwin's doctrine, Evolution, leapt from the pages of a scientific monograph into every level of society in Europe and America with sensational suddenness. It created a sheerly dividing line between the God-fearing bourgeoisie who were appalled, and those people of sweetness and light whose business it was to look down at the bourgeosie from a great height.