Reply to Rice and Henderson-Sellers: Survival of the fittest is not always the best option

We would like to thank Rice and Henderson-Sellers (1) for their Letter, which largely reiterates a number of the issues brought up at the Sackler Colloquium “Fostering Advances in Interdisciplinary Climate Science” and discussed in our introductory review of this event (2). In particular, Rice and Henderson-Sellers discuss the fact that barriers to interdisciplinary research have long been recognized, that interdisciplinary fields can develop into independent disciplines, and that fledgling interdisciplinary fields would benefit from more imaginative avenues of support. However, we disagree …