A person can study one topic or field their entire life, but I wouldn’t call such a person a scholar. For example, I can study how the arbitrary location of stars visible to the naked eye, at the time of a person’s birth, might affect that person’s behavior or personality. But no one can, or should, call such lifelong study scholarly work. For me, the definition of a scholar is not only someone who is knowledgeable in multiple fields, but one who must be able to synthesize knowledge across multiple fields into one overarching, logical, and rational. For example, a scholar would be someone who has training in neuroscience, but who can synthesize the actions the neurons and neuroplasticity with anthropological behavior and use those two fields to explain the actions of individuals/societies throughout history. I believe such synthesizing of multiple fields to produce one big idea or explanation is not only possible, but inevitable.

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