[Alamo-Girl]

Indeed, the Carter Nobel was openly an anti-war hand slap at Bush. The Arafat Nobel was bizarre. But passing over the Pope this year really hurt.

[Right Wing Professor]

It's often been suggested that Graham Greene's Catholicism deprived him of the prize in Literature. Certainly he deserved it more than most of the nonentities that have won it recently.

I think we need to distinguish between the Peace and Literature prizes, which are highly politicized, and the Physics, Chemistry and Medicine prizes, which are not (at least not in terms of conventional politics; academic politics are a different matter).

I can honestly say I don't know the political or religious views of 90% of my colleagues. There are three academic scientists who are anti-evo, and with whose work I am professionally familiar - Henry F. Schaefer, Michael Behe, and Raymond Damadian. In all three cases, I learned of their beliefs on FR, long after I was familiar with their research, and was rather surprised in each case. This sort of stuff simply doesn't come up, as a general rule. I doubt the Nobel Committee even knows about it.