See, after Gollum crawled out from under the rubble of Mt. Doom, he had enough smarts to seek a career in academia:
It is well established that many academics feel precious about their research fields, but now there is a name for how some go a step further and try to wreck colleagues’ attempts to encroach on their areas of expertise – the “Gollum effect”.
Scholars who examined “research opportunity guarding” – how some professors have lied, threatened and sought to sabotage the careers of those seeking to move into their topic – liken the behaviour to that of the maniacally possessive guardian of the Ring of Power from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth chronicles.
“Like the greedy Gollum, many researchers believe they have the sole right to particular aspects of research,” explained Jose Valdez, a postgraduate researcher at German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Leipzig, who has studied the phenomenon with the University of Newcastle’s John Gould.
Writing in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, the pair describe how an animal science researcher had contacted an expert to ask advice on using their methodology to study a different species. When the expert claimed that he was considering doing that same experiment, the researcher desisted, but the research was never undertaken.
Jack Grove, “My precious! How academia’s Gollums guard their research fields” at Times Higher Education (June 9, 2022)
The paper is open access.
That is over and above stuff like Darwin policing.