It is worth noting first how “society” is used in everyday language today. There are only two ways really. The broad one includes the citizens of a nation state, an “anonymous” society in Moffett's terminology. The narrow one is members of some formal organization, which may be anonymous if national, for example, or “individual” in Moffett's terminology if a local branch say. These formal organizations generally fall into four broad categories although the second and third of these may overlap in their activities. The four are academic organizations (e.g., the Society for the Study of Evolution or the Society for the Social Studies of Science); organizations promoting some cause (e.g., the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals); charitable organizations (e.g., the Arthritis Society of x); and professional associations (e.g., the Law Society of x), for example.

But everyday usage is not what Moffett's article is after. Rather it is an ambitious and interesting effort to establish a definition of societies in the service of cross-disciplinary study of such. On the one hand, in that context the article may be more philosophy of science than brain and behavioral science. Do not misunderstand me; I agree that “meanings matter” so that the kind of conceptual analyses philosophers of science engage are important to be sure. Ultimately however, in science, the point is their use in explanations so my comments will ultimately focus on those. On the other hand, the short and long definitions offered and the expansion and qualifications offered for each point through the subsequent sections such as occupying territory, persisting through generations, and so on might be seen as a scientific theory of properties of societies that are associated, and hence constitute a scientific theory of societies. They are interesting and useful and seem to me that they pretty much coincide with how contemporary archaeologists, historians, and even anthropologists use the term (e.g., Riris et al., Reference Riris, Silva, Crema, Palmisano, Robinson, Siegel and Ren2024). However throughout, beyond casual mentions of “minds,” “brains,” that they “absorb,” “grow to be sensitive,” and so on, the article actually disavows proposing answers to the scientific questions of how members’ “markers of identity” and “their recognition” are acquired or what the concept of “a society” explains.

According to current knowledge, there really are only a few possible answers to those questions. Although “selection acting on the individual members, the group as a whole, or both” is also casually referred to, the article does not go further down that road. Members of a society are first and foremost members of the same species, whether human or otherwise. Despite having had E. O. Wilson as a mentor, while the word “evolution” or variants of it such as “evolutionary” appear in the document 50 times, only one of those is in the text, one in the acknowledgements, and 48 are in the references! Acquisition of those species-specific components of identities and their recognition have obviously evolved biologically – at least in the modern new or extended evolutionary synthesis sense which includes development and ecological interactions with development, physiology, and behavior as well as evolution and genetics (e.g., Blute, Reference Blute2017). Of course all members of a species are never all members of a single society, except possibly at the point of speciation in some cases, so a further narrowing beyond that is required.

Then we turn to learning whether by individual or social mechanisms. Individual learning including sensitization, habituation, classical and instrumental, or operant conditioning can be seen as aspects of a single selection-type process analogous to the new or extended evolutionary synthesis (Blute, Reference Blute2001, Reference Blute2016). Then there is also social learning, whether by observation in any sensory modality or by linguistic instruction. The former is widespread in other species as well (for a review, see Whiten, Reference Whiten2022), but the latter, to the best of our current knowledge, is confined to humans, although questions about that are arising (Kershenbaum, Reference Kershenbaum2024). And thirdly, the commonness of social learning, especially but not exclusively in humans, makes a sociocultural evolutionary process inevitable (for overviews in humans, see Blute, Reference Blute2024; Blute & Jordan, Reference Blute, Jordan and Hopcroft2018). But why completely reject sociological concepts such as interaction and social networks as well as culture from the definitions rather than including them in a restricted form – for example, some of whom interact, who participate in some of the same social networks, who share some common culture, and so on?

And finally, we move on from what makes societies to what they explain. Thankfully, Moffett does not get caught up in the cooperation within societies, conflict between them stereotype. In fact, he agrees with Simmel that the two are inseparable. Most social relationships are a mixture of the two. If a relationship begins with cooperation, conflict over the benefits of the cooperation is commonly added. If it begins with conflict, cooperation is commonly added as individuals gang up on either side (Blute, Reference Blute2011). In any case, I am looking forward to reading the study on vertebrates that Moffett has underway as well as works by others, influenced by this article, hopefully works on the science as well as on the philosophy of societies.