Review of The Human Swarm by Mark W Moffett

The book I didn’t know I needed.

The Human Swarm by Mark W Moffett is the book I didn’t know I needed. It covers a topic that’s been missing from the discussion of human society, and the perspective it offers fills gaps in what I’ve learned from other books. Moffett covers the topic of anonymous societies—animal groups in which other animals are identified as “members” even by individuals that don’t know them personally. An Argentine ant, for example, can be accepted by other Argentine ants of its super-colony even hundreds of miles away from its origin, using scent as a marker of belonging. Likewise, Mohawk Indians were able to identify and welcome each other even when they didn’t know each other, thanks to their distinctive hairstyles. Moffett identifies a sort of social organization that is highly unusual in the animal kingdom. A more common arrangement is a flock, herd, or nesting colony, where individuals that don’t know each other get along, and that’s because no individuals are excluded. In intimate bands or families, by contrast, only individuals who know each other are welcome. For a small number of animal species, however, a society consists of individuals that can identify each other as “compatriots” without knowing each other personally. This social organization is found among Argentine ants, scrub jays, and humans.

It’s no coincidence that Moffett’s mentor was E O Wilson, the ant expert who revolutionized our understanding of human nature with his book Sociobiology (1975). It’s humbling and exhilarating how much we can learn about human society by comparing and contrasting ourselves to ants. For my purposes, Moffett’s description of Argentine ants was worth the price of the book. Unlike other ant species, Argentine ants form super-colonies with multiple queens. In Argentina, these super-colonies are kept in check by only one thing: other super-colonies of Argentine ants. In California, where the Argentines are an invasive species, they spread almost without limit. Again, their only limit is another super-colony, which is invasive itself. The comparison to humans is elementary.

E O Wilson hugging Grandmother Fish
h/t Greg Epstein

One of the revolutionary findings of contemporary psychology is that humans are “groupish”, as Jonathan Haidt puts it in his seminal book The Righteous Mind (2012). Freud taught that humans are inherently selfish, but intellectuals of his day had no clear understanding of human evolution or prehistory. Now we understand that humans are innately social, a trait that we can trace back tens of millions of years to our early simian ancestors. Morality, as modern researchers contend, is an adaptation that helps us get along in groups of our peers. Moffett’s insights help us see this “tribalism” on the scale of anonymous societies. Sure, it’s easy to understand why people prefer their friends and kin over strangers, but this book illuminates the human practice of preferring people we don’t know provided they have the right hair styles, modes of dress, manner of speech, or other societal markers. This book unifies Haidt’s modern-day insights, the globe-spanning analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order (2011), and other big-picture books about the nature of human society and the human animal.

The Human Swarm does an admirable job of surveying the topic on all levels: ants that are more or less specialized, spiders that impersonate ants to predate them, chimpanzee bands with their distinctive pant-hoots, bands of humans who know each other as kin, groups of human bands that cooperate across societal boundaries, groups of human bands that split to create new boundaries, and today’s bewildering mix of human populations. This book is worth your time just for the information about whales and scrub jays. Moffett knows that he is filling in the blanks left by previous ethologists and anthropologists, and this book is a treasury of both big ideas and delightful details. Perhaps the most important information for understanding human societies is the material on non-state societies and the bands that compose them. Here we see the many ways that humans have marked membership in their societies and the xenophobia toward outsiders that was the default perspective.

Disclosure: E O Wilson is a fan of my children’s book, Grandmother Fish, so any friend of his is a friend of mine.