A new paper in Science makes the argument and Jonah Lehrer from Wired discusses:
The larger implication is that the birth of human culture was triggered by a new kind of connectedness. For the first time, humans lived in dense clusters, and occasionally interacted with other clusters, which allowed their fragile innovations to persist and propagate. The end result was a positive feedback loop of new ideas.
WE are smarter than ME. S-M-R-T.
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Grist puts statistics to Herman Daly:
It’s almost like the economy is embedded in an environment, and degrading the latter ultimately degrades the former.
Please tell me that line was written facetiously. 
