@guardianscience: Prize war

guardianscience

Martin Rees: Prize war | Editorial http://gu.com/p/2zat7/tf

Accepting a £1m prize for spiritual works does not make the astronomer royal a fraud or a hypocrite

• Editorial
• The Guardian, Friday 8 April 2011
• Article history

There are evolutionary theorists who describe scorpion flies as rapists, and Nobel laureate economists who insist that affairs of the human heart are best grasped through cost-benefit analysis. Clever people are, if anything, especially prone to intellectual tunnel vision – recasting every discussion in terms of the one discipline they have mastered, with no regard for how ideas that enlighten in one context often make no sense elsewhere.