The plan

At the end of this month, I fly out to Berkeley, give a finishing talk, get my advisors to sign my thesis, spend a couple of days closing everything up, and then Iris and I fly to Deutschland. That is the plan. It is an ambitious one, in that only one chapter of the thesis is done, the second needs major revisions, the third my committee members have not yet commented on, and the fourth I am still struggling with analyzing my mountains of data. And two of my committee members, including my major professor, are doing fieldwork on other continents for most of August, meaning they won't be doing much editing and approving of thesis chapters.

But that is my plan, and I'm sticking to it, until I am forced to think of something more realistic.

Like most places in the northeastern US, Vermont has been having a very wet summer. It rains most days, and the ground rarely has time to dry out before the next rain. This is just how the slugs like it. They seem to be everywhere, doing all their usual sluggy things: eating leaves, devouring mushrooms, sitting on wet rocks, getting squished on the sidewalk. What else is there for slugs to do? This afternoon I saw a group of slugs doing something I've never seen slugs do, or even heard of them doing.

Yesterday, a couple of blocks from home, I passed a freshly roadkilled squirrel. By today, most of the carcass was gone, with only bits and chunks scattered on the shoulder. And on each little morsel sat a garden variety slug, chowing down. The bigger chunks had two or three slugs, each about an inch long, actively feeding (or at least that's what it looked like, it was hard to know for sure, as their mouthparts are underneath). There were a few slugs that had been run over as they fed, and others had come in to finish the job, and eat there recently departed kin.

I've watched slugs eat hundred of times, and it has always been on plant matter or fungi. It never occurred to me that they might eat meat. So of course I checked what Wikipedia had to say on the subject:

"Many species of slugs play an important role in ecosystems by eating dead leaves, fungus, and decaying vegetable material. Other species eat parts of living plants.
Some slugs are predators, eating other slugs and snails, or earthworms.
Most slugs will on occasion also eat carrion, including dead of their own kind."

Which makes me wonder if there was ever a B movie about giant radioactive predatory slugs.

God's bellybutton

Hubble Space Telescope finally answers that question about whether God has a navel.



NASA now planning to aim telescope slightly lower.

Ego boost of science.

There is a very flattering article in tomorrow's New York Times science section, by Natalie Angier, about our article on the definition of behavior. (There is also an online quiz associated with it.) It has, to be honest, many fewer errors than I generally expect from science journalism. The main one that will jump out at most of my peers is her statement that, "neither that textbook nor any other reference he consulted bothered to" define behavior precisely. We found lots of definitions, they just didn't agree with each other, or with what we or other biologists thought the word meant. That said, I think this NYTimes article is much better than most science reporting on the accuracy front. And of course, it is nice to have one's work described as "provocative and crisply written" in a large circulation newspaper.

She did neglect mention my two favorite things about the article; the title is, "Behavioral biologists do not agree on what constitutes behavior," and; in a biological article in a peer reviewed journal, we quote both Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's opinion on pornography and Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mystery of the dog that did nothing in the nighttime. I amuse myself heartily.

Studies in current evolution

Research Question:
To what extent is the number of children people choose to have in developed nations heritable (in the genetic sense)?

Importance:
If it is heritable, this is most likely the largest determiner of fitness outcomes, as the great majority of children survive to adulthood, no matter how many siblings they have. This implies potentially rapid Darwinian selection for those who choose larger families. Over the course of a few centuries this selection could have important impacts on human demography and population. Given an estimate of heritability, this effect could be quantified.

Method:
The old twins/siblings separated at birth databases?

Ethical considerations: many

Likelihood I will actually get around to this:
small

Long Term Prediction

Several thousand years from now, if there are still humans around, someone will look back and describe the last few thousand years as a time of extraordinarily rapid biological evolution for humanity.

A bit humbling

I pride myself in knowing something about a very wide range of topics, even if there are very few in which I could confidently call myself expert. I can converse intelligently on most topics in organismal and population biology, and have read bits and pieces in a large range of other fields. I like to tell myself that this will allow me to make important scientific advances, because I can draw together knowledge from disparate fields. But then when I compare my own writings on the co-evolution of longevity and the brain in primates (the paper I am currently working on) to this amazing detailed, readable and reasonable chapter:

Kaplan H, Gangestad S, Gurven M, Lancaster J, Mueller T, and Robson A. 2007. The evolution of diet, brain and life history among primates and humans. In: Roebroeks JWM, editor. Guts and brains: An integrative approach to the hominin record: Leiden University Press. p 47-81.

The various authors of this paper have each been working on a set of related questions for decades, and they bring together this acquired knowledge into a devastatingly clear and cogent argument. Where I have vague intentions to explore an idea, they have specific arguments and evidence to back them up. I can't help but feel a bit like a child building a pile of sand on top of the great pyramid, thinking I am making it taller when I'm just making a mess. Or maybe it is just past my bedtime.

Angst of science.

I get this terrible sinking feeling when I discover an error in my calculations, because it means there are probably more, and I might have to do a lot of analysis and writing over again, and frankly checking calculations for errors often takes longer than just doing it over. When I shortly thereafter discover that my original math was correct, and I was just having a brain fart, this does not greatly improve my confidence in my other calculations, so I go through and recheck everything else I've done. But part way through that, I realize there would have been a much more convincing way to design the analyses, so I do that, which takes all of today.

Hiking the Montshire

We're in Norwich VT for the summer, while I finish writing my thesis, and before we head off the Germany. Yesterday, the first rainless day since we got to VT, I headed to the Montshire Museum of Science, a mile out of town, to check out their system of trails. The price of admission ($10 for adults) to this cool little child-oriented hands-on science museum got me a map of their trails and permission to walk them. The map shows 0.4 miles of trail here and 1.2 miles there. Doing some addition I decided that an out-of shape scientist could walk all their trails in one afternoon, and set out to do so. The forests around the museum are fairly typical second growth northeastern forest, with a mix of hardwoods and softwoods. Nothing spectacular, but extremely pleasant to walk though on a hot bright afternoon.

The trails are well maintained and marked, and most are flat enough for strollers, although I met almost no other hikers once I was away from the main museum building. They follow the banks of the upper Connecticut river or follow low rambling ridge-lines. Sprinkled along many of the trails are scientific activities and displays. It was fun to stop at the solar-powered kiosk and push buttons to hear recordings of the local birds. When I pushed the button to hear the Black-throated Blue Warbler, a real BTBW responded from the trees overhead. Their scale model of the solar system is stretched out along one trail, with Pluto about two miles from the sun.

Behind the museum is a stream-fed water park/ science display packed with wet excited children learning about waves and currents. Inside the museum is a relatively quiet pandemonium of children running, watching, pulling, stretching and learning the word 'viscosity.' My cousins, three and five years old, incessantly demand to visit the Montshire, and everything seems to be well aimed at kids their age. None of it is profound, but all is well presented and designed to keep kids engaged and learning.

I went about 8 miles (including the road to and from Norwich) in a little over three hours of actual walking, and can now say I have hiked every trail the Montshire has. It is flat, short and simple enough to have made a great first hike for an old naturalist trying to get back into shape. Next I will try part of the Appalachian Trail, which comes right through Norwich. But first I will lay down and rest my aching muscles.

EvoDemo Poetry

A chimpess keeps the knack to breed
until she's not alive
But woman stops and then goes on
another forty-five

A hydra grows and buds and splits,
then does it all again
But man can live his life but once
before his certain end

A rotifer skips infanthood,
lays eggs on her first day
But humans grow and learn and find
all reasons for delay

You'll live your life as humans do
and never think it's odd
But redwoods still are saplings
when we're pushing up the sod.

H1: The universe is 96% aliens.

Most good scientists are deeply impressed by, and even excited about, how little we yet know, how much there still is to find out. Our science and technology are impressive accomplishments, but still very much in their infancy as compared to what is possible.

Imagine, if you will, a tremendously technologically advanced civilization, whose technology just continues to advance. What is the end point? What do they and their technology look like after billions of years of rapid technological advance? I think it is safe to say that we don't know. It clearly wouldn't be anything that we currently have the science or technology to understand. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." We wouldn't understand this alien technology or what it did any more than Cro-Magnons would understand a wireless modem. This hyper-advanced civilization would presumably have explored ever nook, cranny and loophole in the physical laws that govern the universe and transformed their technology and themselves beyond recognition. We likely wouldn't even recognize it or them as technology or life. We might not even recognize them or their technology as normal matter or energy, although after billions of years they would likely have transformed large parts of the universe itself.

Which brings me back to how little we currently know. Modern cosmology assigns only 4% of the mass/energy in the universe to "normal" matter, the kind we know anything about. 22% is thought to be "dark matter" and the remainder, 74%, is "dark energy." We know little about dark matter and next to nothing about dark energy, except that they are necessary to make our equations work out. Putting to one side the plausibility that the equations are wrong, we are free to speculate on what is going on with that other 96% that we can't see but suspect is there. My preferred hypothesis is that the universe is 96% aliens. Which is a somewhat silly way of saying that other life-forms may have transformed some large portion of the mass and energy in the universe into forms we don't understand. Why should a civilization with the most advanced technology we can pretend to conceive of be expected to leave things as they found them? If conservation of mass/energy is one of the rules they can't get around, couldn't a big crowded universe of aliens be expected to convert a large portion of its limiting resource into whatever form allows them to use this resource most efficiently? Dark matter releases no detectable radiation, and as such leaks no mass/energy. This would also help to explain why SETI can't detect any aliens. A civilization that hoards mass and energy isn't going to go blaring electromagnetism all over the place.

Why under this hypothesis would 4% of the matter be left as boring old stars, dust, black holes and light? Perhaps these things serve some function for the dark aliens. Or maybe we, and everything we can see, are a designated nature preserve with strictly enforced limits on poaching. To try to answer this last question is to move from pure speculation to pure fancy, so your guess is as good as mine.

Benign Decline?

For many decades now intellectuals, policy makers, humanitarian organizations and environmentalists have put time, money and effort into worrying about the negative impacts of humanity's ever-increasing population. It is certainly a problem worth worrying about. Everything from food and water shortages to increased disease transmissibility to habitat destruction and global climate change are made worse by overpopulation. Jared Diamond, in his excruciatingly detailed and example rich tome, Collapse, explores how human societies can fail when their population outgrows the resource base on which they depend. World population projections estimate that we will top out at 9 to 12 billion some time between 2050 and 2075. That is a lot of people for this little planet, and the risks are real and enormous. But I've been thinking about the opposite problem, one we have thought very little about, but is predicted in the same forecasts, declining population.

World population is predicted not to level off and stay at 9 to 12 billion, but to begin declining. There are two main reasons for this. First, the fertility declines that have driven the demographic transitions in rich countries are predicted to eventually reach poorer and then poorest countries as well. There is good evidence that this is already happening, as education of females and availability of information have reached places like Iran and India, fertility rates in those places has dropped very dramatically and without Chinese style coercion. Fertility rates are declining almost everywhere, even if they are still quite high in some places. The countries that undergo this transition latest are expected to still get there eventually. If the whole world had fertility rates like what the Japenese have, world population would eventually decline.

The second reason population is expected to decline dramatically is what is called population momentum. A population that had a lot of babies 20-30 years ago inevitably has a lot of babies now, because of the large number of young women reaching their peak reproductive capacity. Iran is a perfect example of this. Iran is still producing an enormous number of babies, even though per-woman fertility has declined dramatically, because there are just so many reproductive age women who were born when fertility was extremely high 20-30 years ago. Americans are familiar with this effect from the "echo boomers" the large cohort of children born in the 60s and 70s as offspring of the baby boomers. Much of what is currently carrying world population upward is this type of momentum. Much of the world still has a very young (median age in Pakistan is about 16), and therefore reproductive, population. As fertility rates decline and longevity decreases, world population is aging dramatically. Median age in Japan is about 47 and rising fast. By 2050, the UN predicts that median age in Pakistan will be closer to 35 and Japan closer to 55.

Somewhere around there world population will begin to decline, slowly at first, and then more rapidly. That is the prediction anyway. The problem is that all of our models are predicated and tested based on increasing world population. World population has increased every year since before the advent of modern science. And it is not only our demography that is based on the assumption of ever increasing population. Our entire economic system is built around the idea of ever-expanding demand driven by ever expanding population. We know how to add new housing developments, houses, cities, businesses, banks and so forth. We know how to tear down small buildings to make space for bigger, taller ones. We have no system for dealing with declining population. How should a business respond if its potential audience gets smaller every year? How should a city respond if fewer and fewer of its housing units are occupied? How should a family respond if there is no one to take over the family business or farm? How should a government respond if there are too few people to pay its taxes or fill its military?

We do have case studies of this sort of thing. Flint, Michigan is talking about condemning and leveling not just individual homes, not just whole neighborhoods, but major portions of the city that are no longer viable because the population of that city has shrunk so fast. Japan, Germany and much of the former Soviet Block are experience population decline, and adapting to it with various degrees of success. The countries that do well despite population decline seem to be those that base their economies on exports to other regions where population is still increasing. If domestic demand declines but overall demand continues to rise, it may not be such a problem. But what will happen if population is declining almost everywhere? Will people or nations increase fertility in response? Will the general lack of children induce even more people to not have children, driving fertility even further down? Will we develop economic and development structures that thrive on population decline, as our current system requires population growth?

Michigan's population decline is directly attributable to collapse in demand for Michigan's main product. Population declines in Eastern Europe are similarly caused by politial, economic and social decline. The types of population declines Jared Diamond wrote about were caused by collapses of ecologies and socieites. If we manage to get through the population maximum of the 21st century without major collapses, we may be faced with the relatively novel situation of benign decline. That can only happen if we build systems that can function and thrive with declining populations. We don't yet know how to do that.

Behavio(u)r defined.

Published in this month's Animal Behaviour. British spelling.

Behavioural biologists do not agree on what constitutes behaviour

Daniel A. Levitis, William Z. Lidicker Jr. and Glenn Freund

"Behavioural biology is a major discipline within biology, centred on the key concept of ‘behaviour’. But how is ‘behaviour’ defined, and how should it be defined? We outline what characteristics we believe a scientific definition should have, and why we think it is important that a definition have these traits. We then examine the range of available published definitions for behaviour. Finding no consensus, we present survey responses from 174 members of three behaviour-focused scientific societies as to their understanding of the term. Here again, we find surprisingly widespread disagreement as to what qualifies as behaviour. Respondents contradict themselves, each other and published definitions, indicating that they are using individually variable intuitive, rather than codified, meanings of ‘behaviour’. We offer a new definition, based largely on survey responses:

Behaviour is the internally coordinated responses (actions or inactions) of whole living organisms (individuals or groups) to internal and/or external stimuli, excluding responses more easily understood as developmental changes.

Finally, we discuss the usage, meanings and limitations of this definition."

Demography of Islamic Extremism

The size of any population is determined by births, deaths, immigrations and emigrations.

Change in population= Births-Deaths+Immigrations-Emigrations.

This is one of the first facts mentioned in any class or text on demography, and is so obvious that we often simply take it for granted. But like many concepts which are obvious in context, this can be easily forgotten.

I am thinking here particularly of the population President Obama refers to as "Islamic Extremists." What determines the global population of these extremists? We can assume that no one is born as a violent extremist, so it isn't births. The Bush administration tended to assume the population of extremists was a declining stock, whose numbers would be determined primarily through deaths. We saw how well that worked out. What the Obama folks seem to understand, and what I believe to be the goal of much of the US's redirected foreign policy and rhetoric, is that the number of violent extremists in the world is determined primarily through immigration (recruitment) and emigration (defections, retirements, going homes, laying down of arms).

Let's assume, again that no one is born a violent extremist. Let's further assume that 1% of the world's 1.5 Billion Muslims have the backgrounds and personality traits such that the proper circumstances could push them to violent extremism. We estimate 15 Million potential extremists. What proportion of those will turn to violent extremism at any one time? The answer is clearly a very small. Depending on how we define our terms, maybe there are 150,000 violent Islamic extremists in the world today. That is if we add together the Taliban forces, al Qaeda, al Shabab, Hamas fighters, Hezbolah fighters and so forth. It is a rough estimate, but will do for now. We estimate that 1% of 1% of the worlds' Muslims are violent extremists.

What if, instead of 1% of potential extremists becoming actual extremists, 2% were? Then we double the number of extremists, to 300,000. If only 0.5% of those with the potential for extremism experienced circumstances causing them to act on that potential? Then we have 75,000 extremists, and our problem of eliminating extremists is half solved.

Nothing the US does is going to kill 75 thousand extremists, or 150 thousand extremists. Not that the US military isn't still trying to kill as many violent extremists as possible, but we seem to kill maybe five thousand a year, if we are lucky. Let's look again at our equation and start plugging numbers into it.

Change in population= Births-Deaths+Immigrations-Emigrations.
Change in population= 0-5000+Immigrations-Emigrations.

Let's plug in numbers for the two scenarios we outlined above.

Change in population= 0-5000+150,000=145,000
Change in population= 0-5000-75,000= -80,000

The number of extremists killed is largely irrelevant in these two scenarios. If we kill 15,000 instead of 5,000, we end up with
Change in population= 135,000 or -90,000

The potential fluxes through immigration and emigration are just so much bigger than the number we kill. Nor are these numbers necessarily independent. One can easily imagine that if brother A has the capacity to be a violent extremist, brother B is more likely than average to have the same capacity. Killing A may increase deaths by one, but it may also increase immigrations by one. If there is a brother C, it may increase immigrations by two.

The point of all this is to say that the most effective way to manage the population of violent extremists is decrease their recruiting and increase the number of their colleagues who go home. Killing them is useful in limiting the damage they can do, reducing their moral and providing alternative opportunities to those who could join them. But the number killed is far less important than the effect that that killing has on recruiting and defections.

I could get into a long discussion of what I think will ultimately influence that (Immigration-Emigration) term, but I won't, as that would stray too far from anything I have any scientific basis for considering. Rather I will simply say that I think the US government has finally caught on that the conditions determining (Immigration-Emigration) are far more important than the number killed, and I think this is a key insight.

Scientific publishing after paper

Yesterday I submitted a paper to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Like most high profile journals they have strict page limits, and my paper was carefully planned to be just under the limit. I got an email from them today saying that they had recently changed the format in which references are given in the journal, and I would have to use the new, longer, format, and resubmit. I had 65 references, so the longer format made my paper half a page too long, which means I have spent the morning making the paper shorter again.

All this has got me thinking about the future of publishing, as fewer and fewer people read their journals on actual paper. The traditional justification for page limits, and a lot of the other rules journals have, was that it cost the journal money to print the extra pages, or the color, or figures above a certain size. Several journals, including PNAS, have even offered authors the option of going over the page limit or adding colors, but paying the extra printing costs. What happens to these limitation as fewer and fewer subscribers bother with the paper edition, and almost everyone goes straight to the digital version?

We are not near abandoning the paper journal yet. Even journals that start out as internet only, as PLoS did a few years back, often end up printing a paper edition because libraries and some readers (especially the older and more established) really like have a paper journal to thumb through. But this is changing. I, and most researchers my age, read almost everything from a digital copy. Some people print out the individual articles they want to read, others read from a screen. It is rare to see anyone my age or younger reading from a bound print journal, unless of course it is one of those rare journals that isn't available online. It is becoming increasingly common for libraries, to save shelf space and money, to provide access to only the digital copies of the less frequently read journals. There are journals which can only be found online, and I suspect their number will increase rapidly over the next decades. These journals (e.g. JoVE) can be far more multimedia than the old ink on rectangle.

So far, this seems to be having relatively little effect on the page limit. Journal editors want authors to get to the point, even if they don't have to worry about the cost of paper and ink. Journals are increasingly offering the option of accompanying the paper with supplemental online material. Those experimental protocols, that video sequence, the large table and the mathematical appendix can all be posted online, with the permalink listed in the main paper and hyperlinked directly from the digital versions. PNAS allows up to ten such files, and the length of all these add-ons often surpass the article itself, but without busting the page limit.

Annoying as it is to have to go through and find three more lines of text to cut to get down to that page limit, I suppose I should be happy that the page limit will be around long after the page itself has gone the way of the mimeograph. I don't want to have to read as much as all those people would write.

I do think the journals themselves will last, even if only online. Someone has to organize the peer review, and everyone needs to have a limit on the number of places they need to look to find relevant papers. I doubt I will see the day when one can be a successful scientist just by uploading my own work onto my own website and inviting people to read it.

A lack of enemies

I am working on submitting a paper to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They ask that I suggest editors and reviewers who are qualified to evaluate my paper. They also give me the option of listing a few people who I want to not be given the chance to peer review my paper. I assume this is so that if two authors have written on the same topic, and clashed on that topic, one can't keep the other from publishing by writing very negative reviews. It is a way to ask that your paper not be sent to your rival and then treated unfairly.

There are people whose previous conclusions I disagree with, but nobody I can think of who I have any reason to believe would treat my paper unfairly. I haven't been in the field long enough or published enough papers to make enemies yet. Something to look forward to, I guess.

The University that Was

The University of California at Berkeley has long claimed, with reasonable justification, to be the world's top public University. The University of Massachusetts has some very good campuses, but they have never been any challenge to Harvard. The University of Connecticut is no Yale. But Berkeley and Stanford have often been considered on equal footing (or rather people at Berkeley thought Berkeley was clearly better and people at Stanford held the opposite opinion). In terms of prestige of faculty, Nobel Prizes won, National Academy members, number of important scientific publications, number of top-ranked programs and so on, Berkeley has long been among the US's top universities and far and away the best among the public institutions. California, historically a big wealthy state with a high standard of living and strong emphasis on education, made Berkeley the jewel of its enormous system of public education.

Berkeley now has this wonderful global reputation, amazing arsenal of high-powered faculty, several former faculty in high positions in the Obama administration and world-class facilities. It also has a crushing budget shortfall coming on top of several years of budget cuts, pay for grad students and many staff that is well below what the university considers a living wage, the expectation of massive staff layoffs in the near future, vanishing budgets for maintenance, supplies and support and deep sense that things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better.

The voters of California, in their wisdom, have used the state's mechanisms for direct democracy to require spending increases, but forbid tax increases. They have amended the state constitution to dictate budget items and make it enormously difficult to pass a budget. They have elected politicians based on looks and swagger and reacted with petulance when those politicians had more looks than brains. The state government has deteriorated to the point that most state spending not mandated by ballot initiatives will need to be completely cut. The budget for higher education is expected to be cut by about $1 Billion for the next school year. Similar shortfalls are expected until the global economy has rebounded, or the state constitution has been scraped and more workable one written.

Berkeley, I think it is safe to say, will not retain its reputation for excellence if this goes on for long. For some years now, as the budget has worsened, Berkeley has had a tougher time attracting the most competitive faculty. Many faculty searches have been canceled, and those which weren't often ended up offering positions to researchers who went for much better deals at private institutions. Berkeley has also been having trouble recruiting grad students. My department this year had six first year grad students enter and 17 PhDs graduate. Administrative departments are being eliminated or combined. Journal subscribtions are being scalled back. Phone lines are being turned off. Scholarships are being eliminated. It's ugly, and likely to get uglier fast.

I suspect that given a few years the economy will improve, and the budgetting process in California will be reformed, and Berkeley's budget will start to improve. I fear that by the time that happens Berkeley will have lost its global reputation, many of its most famous faculty, and its culture of intellectual greatness. UC Berkeley may from now on be just a very good public university.

Forthcoming paper

The paper I wrote with two colleagues on how biologists define the word behavior should be coming out in Animal Behaviour in June or July. I am guessing it is the first article to appear in that journal to reference both a supreme court decision and a Sherlock Holmes mystery. I am certain it is the first one to tell behavioral biologists that they don't agree on what they mean by 'behavior.' I am very curious to see how it will be received.

Adaptive male lactation?

It has long been known that male mammals, including male humans, are physiologically capable of lactating. Screw with a man's physiology by giving him the right hormones, or the wrong series of starvation and then plenty, and he may start to produce milk. No one, as far as I know, has ever suggested that this is adaptive, that this capacity exists because men gain some reproductive advantage through lactation. Rather, it is usually seen as a result of the fact that we share almost all of our genetic material with females, who do make good use of their lactational prowess. Male lactation across the mammalian world is largely thought to be a side effect of intersexual correlation, the tendency for the two sexes of a species to have similar traits.

I am therefore skeptically excited to read that males of two species of fruit bats, one in Malaysia, and one in Papua New Guinea, are said to have "well-developed lacteriforus ducts and underlying mammary tissue similar to that found in lactating females" and that milk has been "expressed" from a large number of male bats.

It is not actually known whether these males are feeding young, and if so how commonly and to what effect, but this is the closest suggestion I have yet seen of the possibility of adaptive male lactation.

Hobbits had big odd looking feet.

Well, duh...

Next they'll discover that Homo floresiensis were fond of tea cakes and lived in holes with circular green doors.