Hmmm. You are describing pretty much any human organisation where people have to compete for limited resources. I disagree strongly with describing learning wh

Hmmm. You are describing pretty much any human organisation where people have to compete for limited resources. I disagree strongly with describing learning what we currently know (or think we know) as reading sacred texts and being annointed as the only ones allowed to perform scientific research. Scientific texts are very much not sacred. Yes, there are orthodoxies which most people believe, and if you are going to go against them, you better have damn good evidence. But you absolutely can challenge them, which is how science progresses and is the key difference between religion and science. Since I just had a paper published in a computer science academic journal last year, (and I'm very much not an academic), I also challenge the idea that only people within the "priesthood" are allowed to practice the discipline. Obviously this will be rarer than people whose day job is doing this, but there is no license to practice science required from an anointed priesthood. So forgive me if I really push back on that analogy, as it obscures the absolutely critical differences between them.