About the talk:
I have spent several years surveying the animal kingdom for the existence of societies, by which I mean groups with clearly defined memberships that have the potential to last for generations. My goal for this presentation at the Centre for Integrative Business Psychology is to present a few exemplars of such groups, some of which are widely known (wolf packs, lion prides, chimpanzee communities) while others are extraordinary and unexpected (certain fish, lizards, birds, and whales). My talk will focus on how these species maintain their intergroup relations, the hope being that comparisons to issues around group identities in humans can at times be instructive, both for the biologists who study those organisms, and perhaps for the social psychologists and the social scientists as well.

About Mark W. Moffett:
Mark W. Moffett is a Research Associate at the Smithsonian . His reasoning in this talk emerged as a visiting schol­ar in the Department of] Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, the institution where he completed his doctorate under E.O. Wilson. The Quarterly Review of Biology reported that his 2019 book The Human Swarm “is a remarkable intellectual achievement of sustained intensity, to be commend­ed for navigating an important yet difficult area in between biology, psychology, sociology, economics, history, and philosophy.” Currently funded by the John Templeton Foundation, Dr. Moffett has worked in over one hundred countries on issues ranging from rainforest structure to animal social organization.