Mark W. Moffett - The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall

This fine work should have broad appeal to anyone curious about human societies, which is basically everyone.

Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Our times are filled with garage start-ups that become Silicon Valley behemoths overnight. Such scaling-up pales in comparison to humans going from hunter-gatherer bands to our globalized world in the blink of an evolutionary eyeand thus now, a stranger a continent away can be killed when we press a button operating a drone, or rescued when we press a button marked Donate now. In The Human Swarm, Mark Moffett charts the science of this scaling up of human societies, and its unlikely evolutionary consequences. This highly readable book is ambitious in its interdisciplinary breadth, rigorous in its science, and deeply thought-provoking in its implications.

Robert Sapolsky, author of Behave

A tour-de-force.

Donald Johanson, discoverer of the famous missing-link fossil Lucy and founder of the Institute of Human Origins

The Human Swarm is a book by a biologist that should fascinate any thoughtful reader and deserves to be taken seriously by psychologists and social scientists alike.

Roy Baumeister, author of Willpower

A truer statement hasnt been uttered: Our groupiness shapes human history. Moffetts book is a wide-ranging, deeply interesting analysis of how large numbers of individual agents become a society. His travels in the world and through vast intellectual landscapes give him a unique view of why we are the way we are, both in our similarity to other living beings and our differences from themour ability to include once alien groups into our own, for example. There is no other book Ive read recently that made my neurons pop at the rate this book did.

Mahzarin Banaji, author of Blindspot

This is a book of amazing ideas, many of them counterintuitive. Mark Moffetts astounding stories of animal societies persuaded me that the future of human cities have been foretold by the ants. Read this manifesto if you like to have your mind changed.

Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine and author of The Inevitable

In the past quarter century, there has emerged a genre of Big History that includes such epic books as Jared Diamonds Guns, Germs, and Steel, Steven Pinkers The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Yuval Noah Hararis Sapiens. Mark Moffetts The Human Swarm is destined to be included in future lists of such books that not only add to our understanding of who we are, how we got here, and where were going, but change our perspective of how we fit in the larger picture of life on Earth. A magisterial work of monumental importance.

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of The Moral Arc

Homo sapiens is a small-group social animal that physically seems to be limited to personal relationships with a few individuals. Nonetheless humanity is struggling to deal with societies of billions as human technologies now pose existential threats tied to those numbers. In The Human Swarm, Mark Moffett presents an intriguing overview of the biological roots and cultural evolution of this now-critical situation.

Paul R. Ehrlich, author of Human Natures

The Human Swarm is surely the most accurate, most comprehensive, most original explanation of our social existence that were ever likely to see, one jaw-dropping revelation after another, most of them astonishing, all of them fascinating. Its true without question, which seems obvious as youre reading, and its very well writtena joy to read.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Harmless People