Intelligence in a recursive way

I found a piece of news of the spanish newspaper El Pais where the peer review concept is criticized. The author argues that many extremely brilliant scientist have been dismissed and not given enough recognition due to their condition of genius. He gives some examples and quotes a recursive definition of how inteligent people relate with each other:

" First class mathematicians want to be surrounded by first class mathematicians,
second class mathematicians want to be surrounded by third class mathematicians,
third class mathematicians want to be surrounded by fifth class mathematicians,
... "