The animal Peterson uses to illustrate that some kind of hierarchy is almost always inevitable: lobsters (which, according to the evolutionary worldview, diverged from humans a long time ago even on a geological time scale) will fight each other for dominance (i.e. priority access to resources for survival and reproduction) and the losing lobster will suffer literal brain reconstruction so that it can continue to live in the new reality in which it is the lesser creature without continuing to consume itself in fruitless challenges; such lobsters can even be medically treated with dopamine as if depressed. The meme of crustacean dominance was already nascent during Peterson’s days as a lecturer, but became viral after the Channel 4 Cathy Newman interview, in which Newman deliberately misinterpreted JBP’s explanation about lobsters and their relationship to hierarchies to imply that Peterson wanted to run human society “along the line of the lobsters” without further elaboration, an accusation to which Peterson (who had endured numerous deliberate least charitable interpretations along those lines throughout the interview) simply gave Newman an exasperated stare.