Among the torments and indignities of adolescence, none creates more misery than being the object of a bully’s scorn. And the worst form of bullying -- even more painful than the fist of an oversize lummox upside the nose -- is SOCIAL bullying at the hands of the head baboons. A black eye will heal within days; a social snub can hurt forever. To suffer the rude rebuffs of a self-appointed tribal dictator is a fate worse than a bad report card or being spotted at the mall in the company of one’s parents. And it probably causes more long-term scars than a faceful of zits.

We tend to think of bullying as a primarily masculine form of recreation, a plague of alpha males and their oafish cohorts descending upon the weak of limb and the meek of spirit. With the ruthlessness of gods and hunters, they cull the unfit from their herd by bludgeoning them into submission, physically or emotionally. To be called a fag or a weenie in public is tantamount to being branded with a scarlet letter.

But now the official thinking has begun to recognize that bullying is an equal-opportunity oppressor: it turns out that girls can be just as wantonly cruel to each other as boys. Girls, of course, have known this all along, but it always helps to get a little scholarly corroboration from the experts. While boy-bullies use fists and crudity to nail sissies and other designated rejects, girl-bullies apparently employ their superior social wiles to lacerate their victims. Boy-bullies tend to be more beef than brain; at least the bloody-nosed victims can secretly snicker at the doltishness of their oppressors. A girl doesn’t have it so easy: she’s up against an even more malevolent foe. Far from being a dreamy world of slumber parties, fuzzy stuffed critters and giggly friendships that last for decades, the life of a pubescent girl seems to be, if anything, even more nasty and brutish than those of her geeky male counterparts. Girl-bullies are nothing less than junior-miss Byzantine empresses plotting in secrecy to blind and maim their rivals. They’re bullies with social skills.

A recent New York Times article cited the work of Rosalind Wiseman, who has studied the social depredations of middle-school girls and currently runs a class aimed at persuading them to be nicer. Wiseman has observed the cliques, gossip, barbs and ostracisms first-hand; she has witnessed the unapologetic cruelty of the ‘queen bees’ and the wounds of their lower-status sting victims. She has seen newly enthroned queen bees instantly shed their old friends like yesterday’s press-on nails.

Everyone at the north end of the female hierarchy seems to accept this arrangement with unblinking eyelashes. Girls who know nothing of Darwin, pecking orders or natural selection can discuss the merciless social mechanics of their tribe with frightening astuteness: the accepted ones are winning because they’re winners, the rejected ones are losing because they’re losers, and all’s right with the world. A newly accepted queen bee who dumps an old friend is inflicting a fatal sting -- social death-blow -- and she knows it. Yet she seems to be no more apologetic than a vampire on its first night-stalk.

The bitten one suffers the pain of having been savaged by a former confidante, snubbed and rejected in a public and terminally humiliating fashion. Meanwhile, the new insider finds that she must adapt to a rigid and frequently ridiculous code of conformity -- wearing certain outfits on designated days of the week, for example. After all, social success is a function of one’s ability to master the codes -- so you might as well start learning in middle school. The social codes will prove to be a lot more useful in later life than reading about plate tectonics or the Teapot Dome Scandal.

How is it, I wonder, that certain favored individuals set themselves up as the arbiters of adolescent social fitness? Who gives them an authority exceeding that of teachers and even guidance counselors? How is it that their judgments reverberate throughout the tribe, so that the individuals singled out for rejection by the generalissimo are automatically snubbed by the inner circle of colonels and lieutenants? Both the bullies and the bullied -- male and female alike -- know that there’s more to this game than deciding who gets to be invited to the in-crowd’s Saturday night parties. The social arbiters are, in effect, deciding who deserves to reproduce with the most desirable specimens of their generation. The in-crowders of both sexes are culling their ranks, rejecting those with odd genetic traits: out go all the long noses, buck teeth, jerky hand-gestures and poetic sensibilities. The insiders generally reject raw brilliance along with hopeless ineptitude.

If the bullies’ efforts succeed, their victims never again take themselves seriously as participants in the great evolutionary footrace. Having lost the last tatters of their sexual self-esteem, they resign themselves to lives of studious celibacy: Saturday nights spent in the company of their geeky celibate friends, technically smart but hopeless in combat. Or, unable to stand the abuse any longer, they might lash back in a red-eyed frenzy of gunfire. Either way, they don’t get to reproduce with the cheerleaders and student council officers.

The ripples from adolescent rejection continue to spread outward through our souls for decades to come. Those ripples tell us where we stand in the great social pecking order, how good we feel when we look into the mirror and, ultimately, which potential mates are beyond our reach. The bespectacled nerd who goes on to M.I.T. despite the taunting of his alpha classmates will end up with a more distinguished career than most of them. But I wonder if the nerd unconsciously shies away from members of the opposite sex who seem too formidable, too socially graced, too comfortable among the insiders.

How skillfully the insiders of both sexes have played their game! And thus the weakest genes -- or at least the weakest as perceived by the hardiest and least sensitive souls -- are eliminated from contention, leaving the jocks and go-getters to mate with the queen bees. Together they produce offspring with the requisite combination of looks, brashness and middling intelligence: in short, future in-crowders. Thus the bullying of dominant males and queen bees ensures that the next generation of in-crowders won’t be overrun with math wonks and palefaced artists. It will look pretty much like their own crowd: good hair, good teeth, lots of pep -- solid breeding stock all the way.