The Human Swarm Book Summary - The Human Swarm Book explained in key points

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The Human Swarm summary

Name: The Human Swarm
Rating: 4.4 (71 reviews)
Author: Mark W. Moffett

Mark W. Moffett

How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall

4.4 (71 ratings)

26 mins

Table of Contents

The Human Swarm
summarized in 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Discover just how societies shape our world.

Societies are powerful things. We may never travel the full length of our home nations, nor meet more than a tiny minority of our fellow citizens. But we may still feel a powerful connection to society, a sense of pride at the sight of our nation’s flag, and a rush of emotion at the opening notes of the national anthem. Outside of our families, societies are the primary groups to which we pledge loyalty; we’re willing to fight and sometimes even die for them.

In day-to-day life, we give little thought to the societies of which we’re part. But humankind’s organization into societies over thousands of years has profoundly influenced our beliefs and the ways in which we behave. The following blinks explore what societies are, to both animals and humans. They look at the startling similarities we share with ants, and explain how our anonymous lives mark us humans out from most other mammals.

In these blinks you’ll learn

why three-month-old babies display signs of discriminating racially;
how ants work harmoniously and anonymously with each other; and
why immigration sets us humans apart from our chimpanzee relatives.

Knowing your neighbor is a big advantage for most animals, but it also limits how big societies can get.

Ever taken a job as a babysitter? Then you’ve got something in common with meerkats. Meerkats care for infants outside their immediate families, too – and they even go the extra mile while doing it, tidying each other’s burrows and offering delicious insect snacks to the babies in their care.

Just like humans, meerkats live together in societies, where they benefit from mutual cooperation. Many other vertebrates do, too – societies such as those of wolves, or birds like the Florida scrub jay, are based entirely around cooperative child-rearing. Cubs in a wolf pack even help their parents and other adults raise newborns.

Cooperation can also bring powerful benefits when it comes to protection and security. Living in a society means more eyes and ears for spotting rivals and threats, and more paws and claws for fighting back against them. Elephants, for example, work together to safeguard their young by forming a shield to protect them against lions, while horses encircle their foals and kick outward when wolves approach.

So society offers benefits to its members – but these benefits are offered only to that exclusive, bounded group, and it’s obvious to group members when an outsider is in their midst. Vervet monkeys in Africa, for example, can tell not only when individuals are foreign to their group – they can even tell to which tribe the foreigner belongs!

Most animal societies are built around this individual recognition – recognizing and knowing each individual in a tribe in the same way that humans recognize everyone in their office or class. This feature limits the size of most societies; that’s why we don’t see thousand-strong prides of lions roaming the plains, felling herds of wildebeest. Nor will we ever see apes rising up, Planet of the Apes-style; the animals’ brains are too small to recognize all the individuals in such a large group. That’s why ape societies max out at around 200 members.

Humans manage to live in far, far larger societies, because we’ve broken free of the need to recognize each individual member of our own group. To understand how we’ve done this, let’s take a look at a species that resembles us more than we may care to imagine: ants.

Ants live in anonymous societies of huge size and underappreciated sophistication.

In some parts of the world, humans drive on the right-hand side of the road; in others, on the left. But the marauder ants of Asia have found a different solution: on their busy highways, inbound traffic flows down the center of the road, while outbound ants stream down both outside lanes.

We humans may share more genes with chimps. But our monkey relations don’t deal with traffic management, assembly lines, or waste management. Ants, like humans, do.

Ant societies have more in common with our own societies than we might care to imagine.

Think back to the last time you sat in a busy coffee shop or on a bus, or went to a bar for a drink. You might not have realized it, but something remarkable occurred: you were surrounded by unknown members of your species, but nothing bad happened. If a chimp encountered a stranger, let alone a whole café of them, he would have to fight or flee. Only a female chimp could survive such an encounter peaceably, and only then if she were in the mood for sex.

Humans, on the other hand, are able to live relatively peacefully in societies in which they don’t recognize other members personally. So are ants.

Markers are an evolutionary means by which humans can identify a society’s members and outsiders.

In the film Inglourious Basterds, a British spy, in disguise in a German bar, orders three beers. But to do so he raises his middle three fingers instead of the thumb, index finger and middle finger, as a true German would do. He’s instantly revealed to be an outsider, and a huge fight ensues.

Humans have a huge variety of markers that signify our membership in a society and allow us to identify fellow members and outsiders.

Markers are powerful forces, and our recognition and use of them is hardwired.

Consider an equilateral cross, with its arms hooked forward at ninety degrees. This symbol, the swastika, once caused Nazi hearts to swell.

Markers are not just easy ways to identify whether someone belongs. They can also carry powerful meaning. And it appears that we humans are hardwired to use and react to them.

Despite living very different lives from us, hunter-gatherers lived in clearly defined societies.

Earlier in human history, our hunter-gatherer forebears lived lives that, on the face of it, were very different from our own. With no agriculture, they depended on the food that nature provided – with a little help from poison arrows and other basic tools.

Nonetheless, hunter-gatherers all over, from the Inuit in the Arctic to aboriginal people in what is now Australia, lived in clearly defined societies called band societies.

Societies have clear characteristics and believe themselves to be superior to others.

The Jahai hunter-gatherers of Malaysia refer to themselves as “menra.” The Canadian Beaver Indians call themselves “Dane-Zaa,” and the Kusunda people of Nepal say “mihhaq.” Each of these names means the same thing: “real people.” And it’s not just venerable tribes that share this trait. The words “Dutch,” for the people of the Netherlands, and “Deutsch,” for Germans, come from the word in each language for “human.”

If this all sounds a little self-centered, that’s because a key feature of societies is that they have a collective belief in their own superiority.

Human societies are unique in managing to assimilate outsiders successfully in large numbers.

Try to integrate a captive chimp into a new community, and you’re in for a tough time. It’s a hard, bloody task, requiring months of carefully handled introductions and a whole load of fights. Xenophobic chimpanzees only adapt because, having lost their original society, they have no choice.

So it is a remarkable achievement that, despite all our inborn favoring of insiders over outsiders, human societies have become relatively good at accepting and assimilating newcomers – so long as a few conditions are met.

Modern state societies are not permanent, but the need for societies is.

Whatever society you live in, one day it will cease to exist.

Societies have never been permanent, and they never will be. Archaeologist Joyce Marcus has shown that state societies in ancient times had a clear life span of between two and five hundred years. After growing through war and the acquisition of territory and people, they eventually splintered, usually along long-ingrained ethnic or territorial lines.

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What is The Human Swarm about?

The Human Swarm (2019) is a groundbreaking exploration of human society, from its origins to the huge civilizations found on the planet today. Drawing on psychology, anthropology and biology, it shows how humans have managed to create and maintain societies of a size and complexity unrivaled in the animal kingdom.

Who should read The Human Swarm?

Those interested in how society works
Armchair psychologists who’d like to understand our relations better
People curious about the evolution of human behavior

About the Author

Mark W. Moffett is a scientist and real-life adventurer who was once called the Indiana Jones of entomology – the study of insects. A research associate in the Entomology Department at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History, he has shared his passionate interest in bugs, animals and human behavior on shows like The Colbert Report and Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

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