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Mark is an explorer, naturalist, and photographer who has traveled to more than a hundred countries to document new species in extremely remote places. He takes a special interest in insect societies, especially ants. Affectionately known as Dr. Bugs, Mark has published extensively in outlets like National Geographic and been a frequent guest on TV and Radio, including Stephen Colbert, Conan O’Brien, and RadioLab. Mark has also authored several popular books, including The Human Swarm, which explores what insect societies have in common with primates and humans. Mark joins the podcast to discuss insect and animal societies and how they relate to humans. 

“How can we build resilient communities amid myriad risks?” A study on cooperation sheds light on how we can use cooperation to address unavoidable risks. Read Cooperation—The Ancient Technology That Never Goes Obsolete.

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.


Tom: Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark: Hey, great to be here, Tom.

Tom: I wanna start by asking you, where did you grow up, and what was the first creature you took interest in as a child?

Mark: Well, I assume, prenatally, it was my mother, but, you know, as soon as I was born, which is in Colorado, a small mountain town, Salida, I, uh, pretty much turned away from her towards the ant. And I began watching ants, you know, down in my knees in the backyard, scrambling along. They seemed the most interesting thing to me. Much more interesting than people. So there you go.

Tom: Did you dream about being a scientist from an early age, or did that only come about later?

Mark: I wanted to be an adventurer because I started reading books by Alfred Russell, Wallace, and Bates, and other early explorers. Of course, they were doing things in the realm of biology, but they were doing them in places that seemed very exotic and, in my imagination, you know, my backyard was exotic, and that’s the fundamental thing. I don’t need to go to the tropics I’ve chosen. But any kid can discover all kinds of things without moving more than a few yards.

Tom: I don’t know many ant researchers, but I have heard of EO Wilson. I’ve heard that, he was a mentor of yours, and I wonder if you could tell me, you did together.

Mark: Slight backstory, I was a high school dropout ’cause I never focused on school. So, not knowing what I was supposed to do in life or who was in what you do around important people. I wrote Ed Wilson a letter, and, he wrote me back. I said, you know, I just love studying ants. I have your book The Insect Societies, which is really cool. And so, I stopped by and visited him at Harvard, not knowing you’re just to pop into a professor’s office, particularly one of some merit. He opened the door, and I gave him a big handshake and called him Ed right off, which I later learned I’m not supposed to do until I get the PhD. But I had already started calling him Ed. So I got to become his student, which was awesome.

He was like another kid down on the ground studying ants. Just not thinking about the fact that they’re small and insignificant. They’re thinking of them as grand things. Once you get down close enough to the ground ants tower, doing all kinds of cool things, like aliens in the movies.

Tom: What specifically about a society that kind of concept appeal to you?

Mark: Well, as I started traveling around the world looking at different species and living with different people, seeing these kinds of groups, tribal groups, and hunter-gatherer groups, in some cases for the humans, but different kinds of very solidly bounded groups in different animals, and asking myself what sets these boundaries and what animals have them and what don’t. Even my advisor, Ed Wilson, who wrote a book called Sociobiology, never really defined what a society was in a satisfactory way. And I began to think about that and these commonalities across different species and in humans throughout our history, and whether we might learn something by going across the normal boundaries between, uh, social sciences and the biological sciences, and finding out how different animals solve problems.

Tom: Yeah. So I think for most of us, our sense of society is a very loose term, very ill-defined, but you’ve developed it as a technical term. So for our listeners, could you describe like what are the distinguishing features that make something a society?

Mark: Yeah, well, there are all kinds of definitions of the word society. Any dictionary will tell you that. But I was interested in this kind of as, as I said, bounded groups with clear memberships. And when I thought about them, I realized that a real good, minimal way of conceptualizing them basically involves three components.

One is that the members know who belongs and who doesn’t. They know who’s in and who’s out. The ingroup and outgroup idea of social psychology.

The second part of that is that those kind of memberships have to be able to endure through the generations. It’s something that you’re usually born into, and you expect your grandchildren are gonna be part of it. So it’s not some kind of loose affiliation. It’s not something that comes and goes, are more permanent kinds of groups.

And the third thing is that they, uh, have some kind of. control over a space, a territoriality. And that doesn’t mean that they don’t allow visitors in. We control tourists and other things and our nations, but you just don’t have an unbounded thing with individuals coming and going through those physical boundaries.

So when I started looking at, across the animal kingdom and in humans for that kind of grouping, I began to realize that they have been universal for humans going back through time, and I think all the way back to chimpanzees, who have similar sorts of bounded groups as we do in that sort of sense.

And they occur in scattered ways throughout the animal kingdom, including, some really curious animals that hadn’t really been thought of before or looked at seriously, that I thought were added a lot to the discussion. So this gave me an excuse to look around the world and see what made sense to me and how these groups function and what they meant to, to their members.

Tom: Next question I wanna ask you, what is the function of a society like, why do many different animals exist in societies?

Mark: In general, what I look around at, the examples that I’ve come up with, I see that societies do have certain kinds of commonalities they provide for and protect their members. The members can share information and pool their talents by being in a defined group, uh, you can know who your both, your friends are and your enemies are. We talk about cooperation a lot within societies, but we have a lot of dysfunction and discord in societies. Sometimes we may have noticed that. And, the boundaries allow us to at least know who belongs and who doesn’t. Whether we like them or not, we have to deal with it.

Tom: Mm-hmm. I wanna ask you about a couple different societies, and ones that show some fascinating similarities and differences. So maybe we can start with your first love, ants, and again, in common parlance. I think of ants as they belong in colonies. And when I was in college, I heard some of my professors talk about, well, yeah, they’re colonies, but there’s another way to think about them is like. a super organism. So it’s like an individual. It wasn’t until I read your book did I think that, oh, another way to think of this group of ants is as a society.

So what do you learn or what kind of insights do you gain by considering ants as a society?

Mark: Well, what I realized when looking at ants is that they have certain commonalities with us that are unexpected, but really important. Sometimes, when you compare humans to ants, even though it’s in the Bible, go to the ants, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise, says King Solomon, who, probably, a child watched ants like I did. But, reason to compare ants to humans isn’t because they’re alike. It’s because they’re different. Comparing two things that are identical is extremely boring.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Mark: The really interesting things in science come about by finding points of comparison between things that you don’t expect to be alike. And ants and humans have a commonality that’s critical and hasn’t really been discussed before. And talk about it in terms of a chimpanzee entering a Starbucks. Okay? This is a Starbucks full of other chimpanzees. Now, a chimpanzee could not do this. A chimpanzee could not enter a Starbucks full of other chimpanzees it doesn’t know without going crazy, without either trying to kill those other chimpanzees or being killed by them.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Because a chimpanzee does not allow for strangers in their societies.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Mark: This is something that ants and humans do. Ants and humans can identify society members. Without knowing them as individuals, we can walk through Grand Central and figure out who we’re comfortable with and who we’re not comfortable with by identifying,  subconsciously, all kinds of things about the people around us. We’re doing that. Psychologists, social psychologists are showing at a very fast rate, in the blink of an eye, we’re taking in all kinds of information about those around us. And, whether they fit or not into, uh, the scheme we have in our heads of who belongs and who doesn’t. And throughout human history, this has been a way of defining society memberships.

And you can also allow into your grand central groups that you’re comfortable with, like French and British citizens, and so forth. But there are limits in what we find acceptable, which causes us to get nervous. And now it’s of course very complicated ’cause there’s societies that are big with all kinds of ethnic groups in them and all kinds of movements between societies.

But looking back at history and how these identifications emerge that allow us to detect who belongs and who doesn’t become part of the story I’m looking at. And ants do that by having a kind of a national flag.

Tom: Hmm.

Mark: Ants have a colony scent, a smell that consists of a number of different kinds of hydrocarbon molecules and the right ratios that end up being like a flag. And you either have that in the case of the ants, you’re dead. Ants do not tolerate foreigners. We do, and of course, our kind of national flag is one we carry around on our bodies as well. It’s all kinds of things. We are kind of walking billboards of our identity, all kinds of features, not just languages, but all kinds of subtle cues that we’re taking in all the time.

Tom: Mm-hmm. So they are employing chemistry to identify, an ant belongs or doesn’t belong. It’s, it’s, pure chemistry. Is that essentially Right?

Mark: Yes, that’s what they do. They don’t have any other kind of, uh, means of doing it. And, uh, they have to learn this, like humans learn our identities when we’re born and in the. First few years, ants do it at a young age. They take in the colony identity and memorize it, basically, and they incorporate it into their own bodies by grooming each other and taking on the colony, scent, the smell, the correct one, and that smell can change over time.

So they’re adaptable in how they interpret that with time. It’s not just set in stone, just as our identities are. Our identities are changing all the time. So ants and humans have that kind of, kernel of similarity in terms of being able to allow for the existence of strangers, which means our societies and ant societies can grow much larger than those of most other kinds of animals.

Chimpanzee societies get up to a couple of hundred at that point, and soon after, things get very strained and start to fall apart. And the chimpanzee society split in half. This happened to Jane Goodall, to her horror, in the seventies. And this was documented in National Geographic, but our societies, because we can take in more members as they grow up and we don’t have to remember them all.

We can just see that they fit or not and incrementally grow and grow and grow and grow. And this capacity was built into us from the beginning, even before we had huge societies. Humans at least had the capacity to create big societies under the right circumstances.

Tom: And it sounds like from what you said, primates that aren’t humans don’t have that ability, that ants have to recognize a member that’s not familiar with them.

Mark: Yes, exactly. No other, uh, primate does this. It was for a while, thought that chimpanzees might have a signal. You know, when Jane Goodall shows up and gives a lecture, she goes, uh, woo ahh ahh. I’m not gonna try to repeat it here, but that is the pant hoot. And it seems that pant hoots differ from one community of chimpanzees to the next.

And it was thought that this was a, uh, signifier for the community. Now it looks a little more fuzzy, so people aren’t quite convinced of that. But there still does seem to be variation between communities, but they’re not using that information as far as we can tell. Chimps have cultures, you know, they have different ways depending on the community, using twigs to get termites to eat, and different ways of grooming each other.

But when a chimpanzee shows up from another community and joins their community, this immigration in the chimpanzee world it’s not attacked for doing things the wrong way. It’s the differences are not recognized as important. Humans started to recognize those differences as important, and how that happened, and when that happened, is not clear. Presumably, at the origin of our species, if not farther back in time.

Tom: Why would a chimpanzee or other primate allow a member not of their society to join if being a member of society is so important?

Mark: Well, societies in most species are pretty small, mostly because they do have to know each other as individuals. You have to know everybody in your society. There are no strangers, as they say. So for most vertebrates, societies are in a few hundred, usually much less, a few dozen. And so there’s a lot of inbreeding possible going on there.

So you gotta do something about that. And for most species, there’s some possibility of individuals transferring to another society. Immigration has to occur, and, uh, this is never easy. A vert monkey, a male in this case, as it’s growing up, eventually has to join another vert monkey troop, and it hangs around. It gets, might get beaten off again and again and again. And eventually, maybe it gets accepted. And it’s really interesting how that happens. Initially, all the monkeys in the troop give a call that signifies foreign male, foreign male, foreign male. And he’s out. And then one day, they switch, and they have a call indicating his status in the troop.

And he is in, even the ones that don’t like him still, change their call. And so he becomes recategorized as a member and moves into the troop. And these kinds of things that happen, across species, are really essential to the survival of species, but never easy, as immigration and humans prove. It’s not something we do readily. Even though in, in times of plenty we often accept immigrants readily. When we feel stressed, things go wrong, and then we’re in trouble. And immigrants have a difficulty. Even new members of the society can have difficulties being incorporated in.

Tom: So let’s take anonymous societies, huge, maybe ants. They have millions of members. Are they basically absolutely closed societies where they don’t need other members of society for some of these reproductive purposes?

Mark: Well, in ants, all societies are impermeable. There’s no chance of immigration. So even a small colony of ants is totally nationalistic in the sense that they do not allow anyone in. And, uh, those colonies in some cases can grow. And in some very famous cases, particularly the Argent Ant, which originally was from Argentina and is now taking over much of California, those calling can grow into the billions and probably trillions, and yet still retain their identity solidly.

It’s kind of absurd. How can a trillion ants behave in such a unified manner? The biggest colony in the world we know is the one that you can see in San Francisco, and it’s invading your kitchen. If you’re in San Francisco as they speak, they’re in your kitchen right now. They’re in your yard. And, uh, you can take one of those ants and drive it 500 miles down to the Mexican border and drop it off just, and it’ll still be fine because it is still with the same society, the same national flag, same scent. But you carry it to Escondido County, across a borderline that you can’t see, but the ants judge with their lives, and it’s dead within minutes because there are four colonies that occupy all of Southern California, and they meet, near San Diego, along battle lines. And so those battle lines are an absolute barrier, but with within that colon itself is pretty much absolute peace.

Tom: We’ve talked a lot about ants and primates so far. I’d like to give you a chance to tell me about maybe one or two examples of other organisms that operate in societies. Maybe ones that we would never expect to have their own societies.

Mark: Well, a couple of the fun ones I’ve been looking at are, uh, some skinks down in Australia. And they occupy little rocky outcrops, in Tasmania, the mainland, those rocky out carp crops tend to be somewhat spread about. And so there are only so many skinks that can stay on each one. And they control that rocky outcrop. Absolutely. The researchers call their societies a fury because they’re so intense about everything. Those skinks can include a pair and several generations of their offspring.

And sometimes outsiders can come in and join. Immigrants do join, they will sometimes sneak over to the next rocky outcrop, and their version of warfare is rather intense. They will grab a baby and eat it. I don’t think humans have quite tried that technique yet. So those skinks are just being studied in the last few years. We don’t know how long these groups last, but certainly for decades. So that’s one. Another fun one is a, a sicked fish. There are a number of different kinds of fish that have societies, but my favorite is one in Lake Tanika, there’s several dozen individuals, usually one dominant male. They all have their own private territories. They’re like humans with their houses, you know, they dig up snail shells and each one has their little spot.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Mark: But they have a joint territory that includes around the barrier a wall. But this is what they do, and they collectively fight to keep out the fish from adjacent groups.

Tom: Can you tell me about Naked Mole Rats? My son has a really fun Naked Mole Rat book. What should I know about them that I can tell my son?

Mark: Well, Naked Mole Rats are fabulous creatures. They’re neither truly naked, nor they’re, uh, moles, nor they’re rats. They’re wrinkly little bags. But, uh, really, uh, wonderful thing about them is that they are basically the mammalian version of an ant. They have a queen that does the reproducing. She has one or two males or kings, if you can call them that. And, a bunch of workers and soldiers that are bigger ones that fight more. They have a territory, and they dig all sorts of tunnels through it like ants would through their territories. And they’re looking for tubers, and they fight with adjacent colonies. And they also have a, a colony scent, like the ants do, they have a national flag that’s a scent. They can identify each other by scent, and perhaps for that reason, their colonies can be in the hundreds, bigger than most animals that have to rely on individual recognition of knowing each other. So in many ways, they’re the mammal equivalent of the ant.

Tom: Now I want to turn our attention to human societies. And the first thing I’d like to know is what’s the easiest way for me to determine whether I or someone I encounter is a member of a particular human society?

Mark: Being as in a society isn’t a matter of knowing things, and this is the source of stress sometimes when it comes to immigrants, because the immigrants pass a test.

Tom: Yes.

Mark: It is about all kinds of things about being an American that even Americans don’t know.

Tom: Yes.

Mark: So in that sense, they’re better citizens than we are by the time they get in. But it’s a way of being. We sense it in each other as a way of being. Are you talking and walking and smiling and doing things like an American, and we’re sensing that all the time. Being a walking billboard includes all kinds of subtleties. There’s a researcher named Abigail Marsh at Georgetown who’s made a number of studies that are quite interesting in that regard. If you see someone at a distance and they’re walking, you can usually guess correctly whether they’re an American or not, versus, Australian.

Tom: Ah,

Mark: You can do that, you’ll be surprised. But it turns out Americans have a certain gait that they tend to use, and if they wave their hand, you can also detect that. If you look at a picture of an Asian person, you may not be able to say a thing about them, but if they’re smiling, you’re usually gonna be able to guess correctly, whether they’re an American or not.

And we think smiles are universal, but apparently, the American smile involves slightly different uses of muscles in the face. And so we’re taking in all this information, some of it’s big cultural things, dialects, and clothing, and so forth, but all these other things are there. And of course, for the immigrant, that’s a trick because you’re not gonna walk and talk like an American during your lifetime.

You sort of learned that as a child, and it’s hard to change it. Your children might start to do a little better, but it’s a gradual shift in how we perceive outsiders, which becomes a source of social stress, as I said, in, in times of difficulty, particularly

Tom:  Yeah. Can a human be a member of multiple societies, like be an insider in more than one society?

Mark: Yeah. So, uh, it seems that we can get away with that, that it works for humans. It doesn’t work for other species. There are some species where some trickiness goes on. So male lions, because male lions spread out, the females don’t always know what the guys are doing. They can sneak over to the next pride and be a part of two different prides and get away with it. But that’s, that’s sneakiness and human. We can outright be considered members of two different societies. That can be kind of a trick because your affiliation. Uh, unclear if things gory, but people would move between hunter-gatherer societies.

Even back then, there was these forms of immigration and, uh, when they moved, they would be expected over time to take on the language and other attributes of that society. But of course, they couldn’t entirely. There are certain, certain things you just can’t change, and so they would be seen as part of both societies, but for a hunter-gatherers and for many people since those were valuable members of the society in the sense that they could serve as a bridge, if you did have to trade or have relationships with your neighbors and keep things in a good up upward, trajectory.

Tom: Okay, so it sounds like it’s possible to gain membership in a new society. Can you lose membership in a human society?

Mark: The basic issue there is the idea of the black sheep. If you misbehave too far outside the society norms, you’re gonna be ostracized, stigmatized, or treated as foreign, a person that’s a member of your society if they behave in a way you don’t like will be seen as worse than a foreigner behaving in the same way. This is a, a horrifying thing for people. So, and of course, those black sheep in some cases can gain following. And you start getting schisms in a society where different subgroups start to behave differently, and that can be the first step in the breakdown of a society.

Tom: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mark: All these species, as far as I can tell, there may be a couple of exceptions. Societies eventually break down, like the bodies of their individual members seem to have uh, certain duration. Those points of breakdown can, in many cases, be over many decades or centuries. We rarely see them. It’s one of the most interesting questions in biology is when these breakdowns happen and what causes them, and so forth.

Tom: Of human societies that have endured, what characteristics do they have that they’re able to, in some sense, hold it together in spite of their internal conflicts, frustrations, crises, black sheep, and secessionists.

Mark: As I say, all societies eventually break down. I think this is true. The societies that are likely to endure, endure the most, are ones that tolerate the kinds of things that lead up to a breakdown. And those include differences that emerge in people’s sense of identity. Because identities change, identities shift.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And ultimately, though, my conclusion is that we are going to have to allow for the possibility that a society may, may need to, break in half.

That there may be a point where it makes sense to do that, and to do that without huge amounts of conflict. And of course, most wars in the past have been civil wars. And can we get around that? I’m not sure.

Tom: As far as you’re aware, are there other kinds of social arrangements besides societies as you describe it, in which humans could live and operate?

Mark: Probably not. Being in a society gives us a sense of belonging. It’s a really crucial thing. And of course, we can belong to different kinds of groups, but the societies are elemental, you know, and one of my favorite examples of a situation that shows perhaps the need for societies is, Fauna, which is an island in the Pacific, which is I think like 46 square kilometers. It was just big enough to be occupied by two chiefdoms. And those societies stayed separate for centuries as far as we can tell. Always two of them. The island was just big enough for two of them. And the fact that they never conquered each other suggests something. And that we may need that sense of comparison with others. Whether we use it in negative ways or positive ways is the big question. We need this sense of in-group and out-group and belonging and not belonging. We need the pride of feeling like we’re Mexican American versus another group. All these things are part of our condition.

Tom: Most of human history has been comprised of small groups of humans living together, and within the last you thousand years, large-scale human societies have arisen. I wonder what some of the features that enable small group human societies to become large group societies?

Mark: In the past, we’ve been hunter-gatherers, but the critical thing there is that we were nomadic, we had to move around and find our food and so forth, and those societies were. in the range. The magic number, as it was known for a long time, is about 500, and they could reach a couple thousand.

And, what caused them to break down every time and fragment when they get to a couple thousand individuals? One thing is, if you’re a hunter-gatherer group spread out into these little bands, you didn’t necessarily know what the individuals on the other end of that territory were doing. You wouldn’t see them very often, maybe once a year. So maybe the way they did a ritual would start to change. They’d try some new things.

They start developing new words. And so you get together and they’d seem a bit off, eventually, you would have a schism, and the two would break in half, and you’d end up with two societies. The last step is when one of these subgroups starts giving themselves a different name.

Tom: Ah.

Mark: Now, what happened since then is we ended up having better ways of communicating over distances. So we’d had horseback and roads, and we had leaders that would set standards in writing, and we’d hear about what the people were doing at the other end of the territory. They would have that southern accent, but they were still part of us because we would incorporate them into our conception of what was allowed in this society. Improved communication was the basis of how societies stayed together.

Tom: What gives you hope about the future as you reflect on both human and animal societies?

Mark: Well, there’s a fellow named Peter Turkin, who’s a historian who gathers an immense amount of data on patterns through human history. And he has shown that there are cycles of stress that occur every 50, 60 years or so.

So you go down to 1960, 1910, 1860, and so forth, and you end up with periods of social turmoil. So even though we’re caught in one right now, the theory is at least that in 20, 30 years, it’ll get better again. I just wish that wasn’t so long in the future. So I don’t know how optimistic that sounds, but, you know, humans are a durable creature. We are always going to argue, and that is a part of our success. People talk too much about cooperation. Too much cooperation leads to stagnation. The fact that we are in tension with each other is the way new ideas emerge and new ways of doing things. So we are just witnessing that sort of accelerated, hopefully to its extreme right now. And I certainly hope it backs away from that soon.

Tom: Yeah. My last question for you: What is a mystery about societies that you’d like to solve or resolve?

Mark: Well, I’d like to know more about where they came from and why they’re so rare.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Because most animals don’t have them. Most animals live in a very loose aggregations, a flock of birds, a herd of antelope, are not units like we’re talking about here. Individuals can come and go freely from them, but why do you set up these identities?

What do these identities mean, and what happens when they break apart?

’cause it has not been studied. This transformation and how we see each other it’s the fundamental question of this time, I think.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And if we can learn what happens there, maybe we can do something about it.

Tom: Thank you, Mark, for talking with me today and looking for more good conversations ahead.

Mark: Hey Tom, let’s do it. There are all kinds of subjects. Maybe I should take you to the field to see an army in swarm sometime.