Biologists who study hive insects, such as ants and termites, report that great insight can be gained into these insect societies by treating each hive conceptually as a single organism. Indeed, hives tend to exhibit many of the characteristics of individual animals; they occupy space, move, reproduce, gather food and avoid danger, they even fight one another. No doubt they evolve to meet new conditions, too. In short, the colony is one animal, and the individuals composing it are as similar as cells, at most consisting of a few castes.

To one extent or another, all social animals exhibit some aspects of this mode of organization. Even humans, who have shown a remarkable ability to create diverse cultures and communiities, can be thought of as a hive entity. The organization of human tribes varies enormously, but they also seem to share many traits in common. From a purely biological point of view, some things will work, others won't, and the same rules of natural selection must apply. Within these constraints, a great deal of variation is still possible. Cultures can be geographically isolated or extended, cohesive or fluid over time, and they can be correlated with other factors, such as race, economics and kinship. They also exhibit taxonomic structure, that is, they can be subjected to and understood through classification schemes and can be divided into subsets or grouped into supersets.

It is the fashion amongst contemporary anthropologists to adopt a strictly objective view of culture and to make no value judgements as to their intrinsic worth. According to this perspective, there are no good or bad cultures, they are all equal. I'm not sure I personally subscribe to this view. I recognize the essential correctness of not evaluating one culture by the standards of another, but there are some characteristics that I feel humanity and common decency forces us to apply some standards to, even while we understand that all cultures will have their positive and negative characteristics, even when judged by the declared and accepted criteria of the culture being examined. Societies which are disruptive to their neighbors, are predatory in nature, or are exploitive or brutal to their own members are to be viewed with suspicion, in my opinion. I concede these may be purely subjective considerations on my part, but sheer objectivity must never be used to justify or excuse wholesale human suffering. This is not an easy field to plow, but I cannot comfortably support a position of complete emotional abstraction here. Animals and plants may be morally neutral, I cannot accept human beings should be.

Having said that, let us abandon these murky areas and consider instead those things we can speculate more confidently about. Cultures survive presumably because they served the needs of their communities, and we must also accept that other cultures did not, or were forced to change, because they did not meet those needs. This tells us all existing societies have some legitimacy by the very reason of their existence. It is also reasonable to assume that cultures change to meet changing conditions, or by diffusion of ideas from their neighbors; they are not static and unchanging even if their members have convinced themselves of that. It is also clear (usually more to an outsider than to a member) that some cultures are not adapting adequately to new conditions, and they they are threatening their own existence by failing to recognize this. Perhaps this is what anthropologists should be studying, rather than just describing what they find.

Margaret Mead once remarked that perhaps the goal of anthropolgy should not just be the observation of existing cultures, but should be concerned about designing new ones. This may seem rather arrogant, but it is by no means a new idea. Institutions delight in creating new cultures, designed specifically to meet their needs. The military is a prime example. So are any number of religions. The efforts of political ideologies and corporate collectives to create cultures more amenable to their control are also quite notorious (and usually dismal failures). And it is easy to visualize environments where it may simply be impractical to transplant the "mother culture" intact. Circumstances will always change it, so why not do it consciously and deliberately instead of leaving it to blind chance and natural selection? Whether or not we actually have the wisdom to do this is certainly an open question, but circumstances may make it imperative.

One circumstance where this may become more than an academic exercise is in the colonization of space. It may be necessary to establish isolated communities far from the home planet, and it may be considered part of their essential preparation or training to give them a social structure optimized to their new environment and circumstances. This structure would provide a base for the initial colonization period and also would contain the scaffolding necessary to scale it up as the colony grows and becomes more successful. The goal would be to create economic and political structures, social relations, even kinship ties that would optimize both the success of the society and the happiness of its members.

I don't think we understand human civilizations well enough to do this, but it is a field we should give some thought to, perhaps in speculative fiction.