So then you do think that human societies can reproduce, despite appearing to say that human societies, unlike humans and ant colonies, cannot reproduce? Can you re-word your statement to clearly indicate what you believe?

> despite appearing to say that human societies, unlike humans and ant colonies, cannot reproduce?

This is not even an attempt to approximate what I said. I said that humans are composed of cells which cannot reproduce, colonies are composed of ants which cannot reproduce, and human societies -- unlike humans and ant colonies -- are composed of humans which reproduce independently of the society. When I specifically indicate that what distinguishes human societies from ant colonies is that ants can't reproduce and humans can, what else could that mean?

This makes nonsense of the idea that a human society could be viewed as a superorganism. They don't have the coherence; they are constantly subject to betrayal by the humans of which they are composed. There are historical processes which look like the reproduction of a society: in the wake of Alexander the Great, northern India received a bunch of Greek colonists who built theaters, spoke Greek, practiced Greco-paganism, and wrote a lot of history, which marked a big contrast with the existing societies which built stepwells, spoke Sanskrit, practiced Buddhism, and wrote almost no history. And then the Greeks took up Buddhism. And they started speaking Sanskrit. And they stopped writing history. And they stopped building theaters. But they didn't go anywhere.

If societies were superorganisms, that couldn't have happened. The loss of Greek culture in India would have simultaneously been the loss of all the Greeks.

Human societies "reproduce" like the human individual organism "reproduces itself" (its constituent cells are continuously replaced), not the way individual humans "reproduce" (make another human like it).

(Except sometimes human societies do really reproduce, like by colonization of foreign lands.)