The setting: The 350-year-old Royal Society in London, whose magnificent neo-Classical base overlooks the Mall, which has Buckingham Palace at one end of the boulevard and Trafalgar Square at the other. The speaker: Lord Rees of Oxford, the Astronomer Royal. Martin Rees is the current president of the Royal Society, Britain's academy of science. It's a post that Issac Newton and Charles Darwin have held before him.
So far we have set a scene that could be from a Philip Pullman novel.
The impression vanishes when Rees speaks. "There are two species in this room," he says, "reptiles and nerds."