What sets ants and humans apart from other species is the ability to live in anonymous societies, which Moffett illustrates with his café example-a person can walk into a café full of strangers, recognize them as members of his or her own society, and feel perfectly safe.
Ants, perhaps, provide the most astonishing analogue, with one colony of Argentine ants spreading from the Mexican border north past San Francisco and with outliers in Hawaii and along nearly 2,000 miles of Europe’s coast. He returns to humanity’s near kin, the chimpanzees and bonobos, again and again, but includes other surprising comparisons as well. Moffett ( Adventures Among Ants), a visiting scholar in Harvard’s Human Evolutionary Biology department, intrigues by setting human societies in the context of those of the animal kingdom.
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