"Humanity's Unique Superpower"

Brad Delong's Substack hits the note I sounded two decades ago in my TED talk:

Humanity’s unique superpower is its twin abilities to collaborate in the creation and development of knowledge on the one hand, and of production via specialization and the division of labor on the other. We are not smart animals who learned to cooperate. We are a cooperative organism that acquired intelligence as an emergent property of our cooperation. These are not the same thing, and the distinction matters enormously — especially now.

And with the establishment of the Cooperative Futures Institute at Arizona State University, my 2005 call for an interdisciplinary study of cooperation appears to be gaining traction.

(h/t Bryan Alexander)