This is a brief MoQ post – see here for background context. If you’re not interested in obscure metaphysical discussion, look away now… (My post on a Eudaimonic interpretation of the MoQ may then be of interest – that’s here)
The MoQ sees the biological level as being carried forward by the replication of DNA. That DNA underlies all the variety of biological flora and fauna, from the virus to the plant to the dolphin. Despite the tremendous differentiation between those expressions (phenotypes) of the DNA, they are still in MoQ terms on the same level of evolution – still structured around the replication of DNA. Moreover, the interactions within the level, and between the level and the lower level (physics and chemistry) can be seen as an ecology, ie that it is fluid; without fixed barriers; the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
It seems to me that the same applies to the social level, and that the equivalent of the DNA at the social level is language. Language stretching from the cries of primates in the jungle, to warn of predators, through the mythological structuring of societies by narrative, and (most crucially) including the abstract intellectual exploration of principles and concepts. Much discussion of the MoQ, it seems to me, is vitiated by an overemphasis upon the distinction between, on the one hand, the primitive and narrative-bound language used socially, and the language used in academia and intellectual circles, which seems so different. Yet to my mind this is a category mistake. It is the equivalent of saying that, because a virus and a dolphin are so distinct, the dolphin is at a different level of evolution. Yet both the virus and the dolphin are fundamentally structured through DNA. In the same way, the founding myths of a community (including the scientific community), and all the ways in which those stories are developed (including scientific theories), remain linguistic in how they are structured and reproduced. Language is social; language IS the social level. Language is to the third level (social) what DNA is to the second level (biological).
(Underlying this is an acceptance of Wittgenstein’s view of language. See my post ‘Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Love’ for an introduction, if you are unfamiliar).