The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall

Description

A specialist on social insects writes about the origins and implications of our own vast social organisation, and the ways in which our ethnic and national distinctions mirror those of other animals. In this paradigm-shattering book, biologist Mark W. Moffett draws on findings in psychology, sociology and anthropology to explain the social adaptations that bind societies. He explores how the tension between identity and anonymity defines how societies develop, function, and fail. In the vein of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens, The Human Swarm reveals how mankind created sprawling civilizations of unrivalled complexity - and what it will take to sustain them.

Mark W. Moffett is a biologist and research associate at the Smithsonian, and a visiting scholar in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He has also authored four books. Called a 'daring eco-adventurer' by Margaret Atwood, his writing has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing.

A work of monumental importance... The Human Swarm is destined to be included in future lists of Big History that includes such epic books as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and Yuval Harari's Sapiens' -- Michael Shermer, author of The Moral Arc This fine work should have broad appeal to anyone curious about human societies, which is basically everyone * Publishers Weekly * Mark Moffett presents an intriguing overview of the biological roots and cultural evolution of this now-critical situation -- Paul R Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford and author of Human Natures Read this manifesto if you like to have your mind changed -- Kevin Kelly [An] enticing whirlwind tour of the fascinating patterns of behaviours and structures of societies revealed through the varied lives of people and animals across the globe... [Mark W. Moffett] excellently illustrates the myriad psychological and physiological processes that humans deploy in unifying and othering - from disgust to implicit bias' * Nature * Apart from its other virtues, The Human Swarm is a book of wonders * New Statesman *