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Mark W. Moffett (1958–)

Moffett asks what holds a society together once it grows past the point where every member can know every other, and answers with a mechanism rather than a sentiment: shared markers. Most social vertebrates run societies capped by individual recognition — a wolf pack, a primate troop, bounded by how many others each member can personally track. A few lineages escaped that ceiling by substituting a badge for a face: certain ants, whose colony scent certifies membership, and humans, whose markers run from language and accent through dress, gesture and ritual to the flag. His signature claim follows from it — that modern human societies are, in their organisation, more like some ant societies than like the troops of our nearest relatives. He puts the comparison carefully: not that ants think as we do, but that two lineages solved the same problem — cooperation among anonymous strangers at scale — by different mechanisms.

Mark W. Moffett (born 7 January 1958, Salida, Colorado) is a tropical biologist, field photographer and explorer. He read E. O. Wilson’s The Insect Societies and wrote to its author before meeting him; he went on to take his doctorate under Wilson at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1989, and within months of arriving had pitched a solo expedition across Asia, spending some twenty-eight months in the field from India to the Philippines and corresponding with his advisor by post. He named the swarm-raiding Pheidologeton the “marauder ant.” His work has run on two tracks ever since — fieldwork and photography across more than a hundred countries, and, latterly, a theory of how societies are constituted. After his doctorate he spent two years as curator of the ant collection at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and has since held a succession of non-salaried research affiliations rather than a faculty post — among them Research Associate in entomology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and visiting appointments at Harvard and UC Berkeley — supporting himself through writing and photography. He has published in Behavioral Ecology, Biotropica and Behavioral & Brain Sciences, and written for general audiences in Adventures Among Ants (2010) and The Human Swarm (2019). Wilson named the species Pheidole moffetti after him in 2003.

Key concepts

The definition of a society. A group whose members share an identity that demarcates them from outsiders and is sustained across generations — beyond mere family ties. Every society, on this account, is marked by its members’ capacity to tell member from outsider. Moffett frames the definition deliberately as a neutral descriptor: it is not a definition’s job, he argues, to explain the phenomenon it names, and he words it to keep preconceived notions of function out.

Anonymous and individual-recognition societies. The pivotal distinction, and the categorical difference in his account — not a point on a size axis but a change in the recognition mechanism itself. Individual-recognition societies are limited by what each member can keep track of. Anonymous societies require no member to know any other personally; membership is certified by cues all members read. Only a small number of species run them — some ants and other social insects, and humans — and the strategy is what removes the size limit, in his phrase permitting societies to grow “virtually ad infinitum”. He argues specifically against reading brain size as the constraint on how large a society can become.

Markers, or identity badges. The mechanism of anonymous membership, and functional infrastructure rather than decoration. Societies built on individual recognition run to a few dozen members — just beyond two hundred at the chimpanzee maximum — and markers are what lifts that limit, letting a society absorb members who are strangers to one another. Moffett is careful about the direction of the claim: markers are not a response to growth but the precondition that makes it possible, and human societies stayed small for a long time after acquiring them, reaching only into the low thousands among nomadic hunter-gatherers. In ants, colony odour. In humans, a broad constellation — language and accent, dress, ritual, flags, and cues subtle enough to work below notice, such as the head-gesture conventions that differ between cultures and mark an outsider immediately.

The supercolony. The clearest natural case of anonymous membership at scale: a single-species society extending across enormous distances and populations, the subject of his 2012 Behavioral Ecology paper, where the question “what is a society?” is posed in its primary myrmecological setting.

Fission-fusion and the life cycle of societies. Borrowing vocabulary from nuclear physics, Moffett treats societies as things that split and merge, and — the promise of The Human Swarm’s subtitle — arise, thrive and fall. Markers drift, identities diverge, and societies weaken and break apart. One structural observation carries particular weight for him: in the evolutionary shift from individual recognition to marker-based membership, the ingroup/outgroup boundary itself passed through unaltered — the recognition mechanism changed while the line it drew did not.

Flatness, and what humans add. Ant colonies reach enormous size through flat, leaderless self-organisation: no central control, no commands, coordination through local cues and specialisation — the queen holds the colony together by kinship rather than by giving orders. Humans scale the same way in one respect, by markers rather than personal acquaintance, and Moffett’s emphasis falls on that convergence. But markers alone, he argues, are not enough for us: human societies also come to rest on an accepted social control and leadership, together with deepening commitments to specialisations. He locates the shift with settling down — sedentism, accumulated possessions — rather than with any population figure, and he is explicit elsewhere that marker-based membership imposes no size limit of its own.

Boundary-drawing and ease among strangers. Two claims he holds without ranking. Our evolutionary past predisposes us to sort people into us and them — to favour our own and rank outsiders below us; and our ease among strangers is not a modern veneer over that but an ancient adaptation that had to be in place before societies could grow past the size where everyone knows everyone. The boundary itself he treats as affectively neutral: societies may hold neutral or friendly relations with one another and still retain their separation, separation being the invariant and antipathy a variable. His minimal case is what he calls a mere acceptance group — nothing beyond mutual acceptance linking its members — and he allows explicitly for cordial visits from non-members.

Aggression and warfare. A strand of its own, gathered in Ants & the Art of War (2011): patterns of collective aggression among ants and their parallels to human warfare — mass mobilisation, territorial conflict between colonies, and the part colony identity plays in triggering attack. The marker does the triggering work here too. An ant surveys with its antennae for the scents of nestmates and non-nestmates, and the scent decides friend from foe immediately; membership is tightly bounded and defection is not available.

Structural ecology. The through-line of his other field. The High Frontier (1993) treated the rainforest canopy as a distinct vertically stratified world, and the strand’s recurring move is cross-substrate structural analogy: canopies, coral reefs, kelp forests, grasslands and bacterial biofilms read as one family of systems that draw nutrients from a fluid matrix and stratify into a third dimension.

Method

A disposition runs across the strands. He works by analogy with difference — structural resemblance across substrates, held explicitly as comparison rather than identity, the ant–human case being only its most prominent instance. He treats definitions as marks rather than essences, tools that demarcate without explaining. And he takes the conceptual scaffolding of a field as an object of study in its own right: his Biotropica paper “What’s ‘up’?” (2000) is a piece of vocabulary analysis by a field biologist, examining how ecologists, botanists, zoologists, anthropologists and aerodynamicists each carve the same canopy space differently. Photography and narrative are, for him, first-class scientific activity rather than an afterthought.

Disputes and reception

The peer-reviewed centre of gravity is his 2025 Behavioral & Brain Sciences target article, “What is a society?”, which drew some two dozen solicited commentaries and an author’s response.

His claim that the society, rather than the family, is the primary social group with respect to its social ramifications drew direct pushback, with commentators arguing the family better deserves that status for its capacity to shape other groups and to furnish meaning. The ant–human comparison is both his signature and his largest target: critics ask whether “the same organisational solution” names a genuine structural universal or an analogy carried past its load limit, while he and his defenders insist the comparison is structural and not psychological, and earns its keep. His neutral-descriptor stance on definitions is methodologically pointed and not universally shared — some readers want a definition to do explanatory work. And as a Wilson student writing on human social terrain, he sits downstream of sociobiology’s long and contested reception, though his markers account is notably not a kin-selection story. Reviewers of his popular books split between calling the synthesis magisterial and calling it brilliant but overreaching; a live scholarly cluster has nonetheless formed around the framework, including a 2026 Theory and Society symposium.

On the human-social-evolution question he is a contemporary of Tomasello and Henrich, carrying a different mechanism — anonymous markers rather than shared intentionality or cultural learning. Robin Dunbar’s cognitive ceiling on individual recognition is the constraint his anonymous-society move is designed to get past. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is the humanities-side twin of the markers thesis, arriving from nationalism studies rather than biology. And Deborah Gordon is the closest complementary voice on how colonies coordinate without central control.

Where Moffett stops

The framework is a description of how societies are constituted and bounded, and he declines, deliberately, to make it an explanation. The definition marks a society; it does not say why societies arise or what they are for — a restraint he states as method rather than as a gap awaiting filling. The scale story names a threshold above which markers need leadership and specialisation to supplement them, without a theory of where that threshold sits or why. And the ant–human comparison is offered as a structural parallel, with the question of how much weight structure alone can bear left, by his own framing, to the argument it has provoked.

Key works