Most of us don't collapse into puddles of stress-related disease. - Robert Sapolsky

The ones who I train to become scientists go at it like the warriors they should be, overturning existing knowledge and reigning paradigms, each discovery a murder of their scientific ancestors. And if I have trained them well, I must derive whatever satisfaction I can from the inevitability of becoming their Oedipal target someday.

The far-from-original point I will try to make now should seem obvious: There is an unsettling similarity between the rituals of the obsessive-compulsive and the rituals of the observantly religious.

This is a classic case of what is often called physics envy, the disease among scientists where the behavioral biologists fear their discipline lacks the rigor of physiology, the physiologists wish for the techniques of the biochemists, the biochemists covet the clarity of the answers revealed by molecular biologists, all the way down the down until you get to the physicists, who confer only with God.