Mark Moffett

Mark Moffett is a Research Associate at the Smithsonian whose reseach has focused on the structure of rainforest canopies, social complexity in ants, and the evolution of societies generally. He has spent the last several years studying the organization of societies in humans and other animals while on sabbatical at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, NC. As a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, Mark worked on a synthesis of how societies stay together and fall apart, across species and in humans right up to the present day. Moffett completed his doctorate at Harvard on the evolution and social organization of an ant species with army ant behaviors under the ecologist Edward O. Wilson. Before that he held a research position at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at University of California, Berkeley and spent two years as an assistant curator in charge of the ant collection at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Moffett is a modern-day explorer with more than a little luck on his side, having accidentally sat on the world’s deadliest snake, battled drug lords with dart guns, and scrambled up a tree to escape bull elephants. His most recent book, The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive and Fall (Basic Books, 2019), ties biology with modern psychology and anthropology with surprising insights. The Human Swarm has been called “a magisterial work of monumental importance” by Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer, while Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, tells us to “read this manifesto if you like to have your mind changed.”