Obsession by another name

Calling Mark Pesce’s blog a blog is a bit misleading. He writes thoughtful essays. Essays that are worth reading very carefully and packed with ideas that deserve equally thoughtful reflection. This is one blog, like Grant McCracken’s and Marc Andreessen’s, where mining the archives carries rich rewards.
I give you this extract, that particularly took my fancy, from a post on Wikis as taster, but urge you to explore the rest of the site for even more intellectual nourishment:
“Everyone is an expert. From a toddler, expert in the precarious balance of towering wooden blocks, to a nanotechnologist, expert in the precarious juxtaposition of atom against atom, everyone has some field of study wherein they excel – however esoteric or profane it might seem to the rest of us. The hows and whys of this are essential to human nature; we’re an obsessive species, and our obsessions can form around almost any object which engages our attentions. Most of these obsessions seem completely natural, in context: a Pitjandjara child learns an enormous amount about the flora and fauna of the central Australian desert, knows where to find water and shade, can recite the dreamings which place her within the greater cosmos. In the age before agriculture, all of us grew up with similar skills, each of us entirely obsessed with the world around us, because within that obsession lay the best opportunity for survival. Those of our ancestors who were most apt with obsession (up to a point) would thrive even in the worst of times, passing those behaviors (some genetic, some cultural) down through time to ourselves. But obsession is not a vestigial behavior; the entire bedrock of civilization is built upon it: specialization, that peculiar feature of civilization, where each assumes a particular set of duties for the whole, is simply obsession by another name.”