Moffett's article is an exciting attempt to define the concept of society from the perspective of biology. By initiating a conversation between natural and social scientific disciplines, he wishes to promote cooperation between different sciences whose subject pertains to understanding humans as living in society, a peculiar type of social arrangement. We eagerly join this important endeavor. Conceptualizing society is centrally relevant for the social sciences and biology alike. Moffett focuses mostly on the similarities and parallels between the forms of living in groups, both in animals and humans. While doing this he gathers a lot of examples supporting his thesis, according to which his definition for the concept of society is valid for both humans and animals. However, a possible meaningful exchange between the disciplines requires reflecting not only similarities but differences as well. Below we will refer to some of the most central problems and concepts elaborated within the social sciences, especially sociology, which are not or only tangentially exposed by Moffett. While doing so we build upon common knowledge originating from its classical authors. Then, we will exemplify of how identity, which is a central constituent of Moffett's definition of society, cannot be opposed to interaction despite his claims. Rather it is to be studied as interactional achievement.

We propose to differentiate between three major layers of meaning of “society.” The narrowest refers to human groups specialized for certain activity – for example, “Royal Society.” This usage seems to be the closest one to the author's proposal. A second originates from a contrastive use, already present in the eighteenth century, serves as a counter-concept of the state – think of “civil society.” The third one is the most abstract version marking the emergence of sociology from the nineteenth century on. This usage extends beyond specific human groups and encompasses all the human – and more. Note that this use is frequently constrained metonymically to certain nominal groups such as nation states.

This latter, most general meaning of “society” is used mostly by social scientists. Society in this sense is the genuine subject of sociological investigation, whose main purpose is to account for emergent social phenomena. This level of reality can be considered as genuinely social, that is, not reducible and often opposed to natural. Human societies create structures detached from unmediated human conduct, which, by overarching ever wider circles of human coexistence, provide the coordination of social order. Society, in this sense includes structural and functional constituents of large-scale human coexistence (i.e., institutions, collectively shared norms and beliefs, material and symbolic systems of artefacts) which have emergent properties that makes it necessary to distinguish them from and impossible to reduce them to the level of individual human conduct. We will shortly refer to some central features of society that, in our view, cannot be reduced to exclusively natural or individual processes: Institutionalization, material production, and meaning formation.

The institutionalization of the mechanisms of societal coordination, responsible for the large-scale organization of society, has been investigated from several perspectives in professional sociology. Durkheim (Reference Durkheim1982) proposed to uncover “social facts,” macro-level constituents of social order determining but not reducible to micro-scale social phenomena. Weber (Reference Weber1978) favored an approach where the investigation of the institutions of societal coordination starts from the level of individual action. Simmel (Reference Simmel2009) exposed the dialectical relationship between individuals and society. Marx (Reference Marx1867–1894) underlined the significance of the factors of material production. Besides the role of material production (Marx) and the organization of the forms of power (Weber), common norms, beliefs, and moral sentiments also play an important role (Durkheim) in sociology.

According to modern sociology, social integration rests on two pillars. System-integration, as exposed by the proponents of cybernetically informed theorists (Luhmann, Reference Luhmann1984; Parsons, Reference Parsons1951), is realized through the interplay of social subsystems, becoming independent from the spheres of human action and public discourse (Habermas, Reference Habermas1981). Social integration is the integrative performance realized by human interaction and communication, resting on the foundations of meaning formation and symbolic relations (Mead, Reference Mead1934). The significance of these factors has been uncovered by the movement of “interpretative sociology.” An adequate definition of society applicable to humans requires taking account of these and similar factors.

Identity is central in Moffett's definition: “Societies should be understood fundamentally as identity groups in which membership is determined by shared perceptions of belonging, rather than as social groups held together by positive interactions” (target article, sect. 1, para. 2). It clearly favors identity over interaction. We agree on the importance of identity but contest the idea that it is more fundamental than interaction. The role of interaction in identity formation shows their interconnectedness. A very significant kind of meaning establishment pertains to ourselves: What we are is partly created by us and partly by other members of the society. We claim that human identity is an outcome of discursive processes. Human social identity is not a black or white matter of presence or absence of an “identity marker.” It can be ambivalent as judging national and supranational, that is, European identity as schizophrenic testify (Bodor, Reference Bodor, Heller and Kriza2013). It can be negotiated, where own-group, out-group, and the person's own stance all play formative roles, for example, in wearing and not-wearing hijab (Aytar & Bodor, Reference Aytar and Bodor2019). And it is multi-layered where situationally attributed ethnic, religious, and national identities may even have lethal outcomes as survivors of the 1943–1947 Ukrainian-Polish conflict attest (Barker & Galasinski, Reference Barker and Galasinski2001).

The intricate dynamics of identity partly depends on the actor's deliberate choice, and partly on the involved in-groups and out-groups. Human identity is a social construction, it is no less and not more real than something natural. This feature of identity is not articulated properly in Moffett.

We believe that humans are citizens of two worlds: As living beings, citizens of nature, and as members of the human community, citizens of society. Even if we cannot solve the involved antinomies, we cannot leave them unattended, either. As Gadamer (Reference Gadamer, Misgeld and Nicholson1992, p. 219) writes: “The science of humans in their complete diversity becomes a moral and philosophical task for us all.”