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Asked by charlotte756 to Joanna, Renata on 20 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by maxgillson123, melissa13.
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Renata Medeiros answered on 20 Jun 2013:
Hummm…. I found out that my tiny harmless seabirds were eating dolphins! (though I suspect they were feeding from dead dolphins)
I also fond out that they are skinny when there is lots of food around for them but they are fat when there isn’t very much at all! It turns out that they are rather clever and decide not to stuff themselves too much if they know they can find food anytime but better eat as much as you can if you’re not sure when your next meal is going to be!
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Joanna Bryson answered on 20 Jun 2013:
My work involves modelling societies as they change, so the answer is kind of complicated. And anyway, I guess the strangest thing I discovered so far is something I was hoping to find, and I only learned how strange it was after I did! There’s a big question in science: why are humans the only animals that have complicated language and build really complicated things? Even humans didn’t used to build things like computers–we’ve been around for 200,000 years, but we’ve only had cities for 10,000 years. So anyway, some scientists though humans talked as a special way of showing off to people who might have babies with you, like a peacock tail, because it isn’t really useful to give away knowledge. I thought giving away knowledge probably WAS useful, so I built a computer program where the simulated people gave away knowledge they’d discovered about how to eat complicated food. This meant that they had to share the food, but my program showed the people who gave away knowledge were better off than the people who didn’t. But it turned out other people had “proven” that was impossible! But the proofs turned out to be with simple math, where my computer programs were more like robots. The difference was that you were more likely to give away knowledge if your mother had, and when you were born right next to your mother, and then over you life you wouldn’t have time to move that far away from her and the rest of your family. That meant that the people who give away knowledge are also the ones who are most likely to be given knowledge, so they get the benefit as well as the cost of sharing. The people who wrote the bad proof had forgotten to worry about space, so they just proved it couldn’t work in a world that doesn’t really exist, where people magically warp around like transporters in Star Trek.
Science is like that, sometimes people make mistakes and you have to catch them. But I was still pretty surprised to catch a mistake by some biologists, because I wasn’t really a biologist yet then (now I sort of am one, since I’ve learned a bunch of biology!)
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