I wish I could run a few of these experiments. Like, what if you continuously increase the size of the pen? What if you introduce some sort of predator or limit the food? What if you give the rats birth control so you can prevent the "bomb then bust" population curve? What if you continuously remove the alphas? What if you continuously remove the non-alphas?
What if the rat behavior was evolutionary adapted to the boom and bust cycles aka they are loopdeformed? What if it is against ratgods directives to not max out rathaven? What if we all are?
The biggest danger by human overpopulation is global warming and other forms of permanent enviromental damage (specially to other animal species), which has no equivalent in this experiment, global warming wouldn't be such an issue if there weren't 8 billions of us, is hard to verify but is likely that if there were "only" 1 billion humans global warming would have progressed only an 8th fraction of what it currently has. Of course any chance of addressing such population issue is long gone but hoping from a change of hearth from the people at charge of the top most polluting industries is even less likely as far as I can tell (fossil fuels, agriculture, fashion)
> is likely that if there were "only" 1 billion humans global warming would have progressed only an 8th fraction of what it currently has.
Unlikely. Most of the greenhouse gasses were released by the wealthy countries. Climate-influenced population-reduction advocates usually focus on high birth rate countries (especially in Africa, hmm), yet eliminating a single birth in North America forestalls the emissions of five people in Africa.
We should be encouraging people to use more (non-fossil fuel) energy, not less.
I feel it's hard to find correlations between these studies and human psychology. It'd require a fair amount of extrapolations, sometimes far too generous to the point of it being a stretch.
Yes, perhaps science does work that way to an extent. But considering how the readings so vastly change as per the group reading it, mostly reflects more on the person reading than the experiment itself.
I guess a controlled MMORP with certain constraints could also lead to some understanding of group dynamics in a similar vein.
> I feel it's hard to find correlations between these studies and human psychology.
I find myself imagining this exchange:
"We put beavers in an environment where there wasn't any tiresome wood to gnaw on because everything was already perfectly constructed. Bereft of challenge, they all starved to death from dental anomalies. Obviously this means humankind requires adversity to survive."
"No, dude, you just failed to understand beaver physiology."
For my uni ecology course back in 1980 I read about a predator prey experiment consisting of hundreds of oranges connected by string bridges and a mite, with a predator. They really struggled to get multi generational scale.
What I read in this is that models for the natural environment with "a couple of simplifications" generally crash fast because real world systems are much more complex.
Maybe what he needed for rodent heaven 25 was a more complex situation to model? Add Cats? Fleas? Diseases? Maybe heaven demands adversity?
Heaven requires that your birth rate stays at around replacement rate, which for humans is easy - a human female rarely gives birth to more than one baby at a time, but a mouse female on average gives birth to a litter of six. The only way for mice to escape the population bomb is by killing babies.
I think removal of adversity was the point. Optimizing away adversity just as collective humanity tries to.
> Incidentally, after Universe 25’s collapse, Calhoun began building new utopias to encourage creative behavior by keeping mice physically _and_ mentally nourished.
I think I'd be more interested in the follow up work. Were they even able to identify and accomplish this? And how did the rats perform any better?
There are two quasi-replications, which mostly failed to replicate the major results Calhoun so sketchily described in his few research publications on Mouse Utopia: Kessler 1966 and Hammock 1971. See https://gwern.net/mouse-utopia#kessler-1966 for fulltext and discussion.
How about yall stop factory farming first. But I guess a curious slightly mad scientist is an easier target than an agrocorporation, the guy probably won't feed you to the hogs.
Scientists and universities with ethics put rules in place to prevent unethical behavior. People without ethics work for Tyson Foods and torture chickens for extra money.
The follow up with Rat Utopia addressed several of the issues with the mouse study.
More interesting was the final follow up selective-breeding study with "The Beautiful Ones". As Dr. Calhoun wanted to determine if the cognitive decline would persist in successive generations even when placed in a new unconstrained exploitation phase setting again.
The process was not reversible, and remained degenerative in offspring. Accordingly, I found this work greatly affected how I processed neuroscience material, and viewed violent behavior.
We must respect the little creatures that warned us of humanities possible future. So far, many communities seem to be following a familiar concerning trend:
> The process was not reversible, and remained degenerative in offspring. Accordingly, I found this work greatly affected how I processed neuroscience material, and viewed violent behavior.
And you should probably take Mouse Utopia (and Scott Galloway) a lot less seriously than you did.
"seriously"? Scott uses humor to present some rather unsettling facts, and while I personally find his mannerism crass... the assertion remains plausible.
>doesn't replicate
Which studies are you referring to exactly?
There was some fair criticism of confounding variables in Universe 25 (the first page google result most people cite), but the follow up Rat Utopia eventually compensated for the carrying capacity arguments.
There were other more recent experiments where lab assistants would play with the rodents during cage cleaning, and that stimulus was proven to be enough to keep test subjects cognitively functional.
The experiment is basically "let's increase mice population until they start to die from overpopulation problems"... I'd imagine this would be quite hard to get approved by modern IRB (ethics review) committees.
Looks like an incredibly easy experiment for a 'citizen scientist' to replicate - all you need is a backyard, 5+ years of mouse food, A/C, and water. And a burrow-proof structure. Someone should do this.
Even if they did, the result would never be accepted. People will nitpick everything they can, from comparability to methodology, to ignore whatever may come out of such a study.
Heck, the original is still controversial to this day and there are many people rejecting the results because of "lack of scientific method".
A sweet lie is preferable to the cruel truth, or so they said.
I am not sure what results are there to reject? "Overpopulation exists"? "Overpopulation can be very dangerous"? "If you stress animals enough, they will start behaving strangely"? Those seem pretty trivial, perhaps even obvious.
There are also people doing parallels to human groups, but as other commenter said, it's not clear at all how mice social behavior relates to humans', given how different they are even in non-stressed environment.
The interesting parts of the experiment aren't the basic 'overpopulation bad' results. I think the interesting stuff is more like:
- what emergent, unnatural behaviors form? (e.g. the beautiful ones, isolated females)
- are these emergent behaviors tied directly to mouse psychology, or to more fundamental things also true of humans? (e.g. is the beautiful ones emergence due specifically to alpha-mouse ostracism behavior, or is this a more fundamental psychological urge to maintain control over what little is still controllable? - which has direct implications for humans)
- what tweaks to this system of, effectively, complex automata result in a stable equilibrium, dependent only on behaviors that are true of both mouse and man?
Questions like that would be hard to construct in an experimental setting, and it would take an insane amount of documentation and rigor to get those results accepted if it was a backyard experiment. With good reason, too. I'd take it with a huge helping of skepticism too. But do it right, and it'd be crazy valuable.
Why not? How can anyone determine that research is not valuable if it's not carried out? There may be ethics points of view, that people may have different opinions about, but how does that exclude the possibility of useful results? Can the degree of usefulness be determined by the degree (or the inverse degree) of ethics? If so, how? Arguments that use self-evidence as argument for their correctness are not useful.
The article discusses this: while there are some superficial similarities, the drivers ture out to be different, not similar, between human and murine populations.
To usefully do any such studies you’d need to develop a model supporting the thesis that there are useful and predictive parallels between the two species for the area you wanted to study. Which would involve other, different, murine and human studies.
I think it would be possible to get IRB approval for such studies after doing the enabling studies. But I’m not sure how to even design such enabling studies.
People who breed pet mice exist and they probably have a lot more data from much longer time periods on this kind of thing. I also briefly talked with a person who maintains the herpetology exhibits at a museum. They breed rats to feed to the snakes and effectively avoid the overpopulation problem by just culling the population. The rats seem to be doing just fine in that arrangement. It does sound a bit sad, but effectively small rodents have evolved to be eaten.
Also, anything to actually do. Animals go crazy from extreme boredom in the same way that humans do, and in many cases with similar symptoms (self-harm, repetitive behavior, meaningless aggression).
Take exactly the same experiment but add as little as just a bunch of wheels for the mice to run on and I'm certain the results would be healthier.
They also had an environment which was not at all what their evolution had shaped them for. 0 gallons of water will kill you, 10.000 gallons of water will also kill you.
I'm pretty certain that fifticon was using water as an example and metaphor, not a specific element of the mouse Universe experiments.
Mice's evolutionary history has evolved them as a small, vulnerable, prey species. In the absence of predation pressures, rather than evolve to a well-balanced and well-functioning society, the same adaptations which are beneficial where most juveniles (and many adults) are killed by predators --- high sex drive, high fecundity, extensive foraging, occasional conflict among mice --- become pathological of themselves.
Too little water kills. Too much water kills.
To much predation destroys mice communities. Too little predation destroys mice communities.
And by extension, similar lifting of long-established, evolutionarily-shaping constraints might affect other populations negatively. The implications for human populations, whether localised (e.g., urban crowding) or global (overpopulation, resource conflict) are pretty clearly indicated in Calhoun's work.
To offer another possible analogy, beavers with nothing to gnaw on have dental abnormalities that eventually cause them to starve to death.
Did the lack of adversity and hardship cause them to fall into fatalistic fugues? Nah, It's just an unmet physiological need that isn't generalizable to humans.
One female mouse will give birth to six pups at once on average. They are unable to avoid the population bomb scenario. On the other hand, a human female rarely gives birth to more than one baby at a time, and we have contraceptives. So in this metaphor, mice are compulsive water drinkers, while humans can just drink one glass and leave.
My big takeaway is that Calhoun must have been world champion at giving blowjobs, because how else do you get the ethics board to approve twenty five of these cursed experiments?
The fact is IRB (ethics boards) weren't really a thing until 1974, and even then mostly for human subjects, It wasn't until the 1980s when most places considered mouse research to require an IRB.
The problem with this study as that mice do not have the collective intelligence to know the situation they are in and there for the input and output is straight forward. If the information is kept transparent to a person human level sentenance the could have entirely different results.
No animal or human deserves to be compared to as their nature while still part of the same kingdom is distinctively different.
Man understands what walls are, what they do, what they mean. It is conceptual and tangible in thought. Pets, the family cat for example, knows only that it is an obstacle. There is no further meaning or allusion, it is to them in all ways just an obstacle.
Without actually talking to the cat, there's not any way of knowing that they don't perceive walls within some abstraction like "building." All we can really say is that the cat behaves as if the wall is some unchangeable object in its environment. You can't know the mind of a cat. Maybe they just like the idea of being inside something impregnable?
> Given these wildly varying (even contradictory) readings, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that personal and political views, rather than objective inquiry, are driving these critics’ outlooks.
That happens with everything. You'll often see people on the internet blaming the collapse of the Roman Empire on... well, anything the writer doesn't like, really. I've seen both 'capitalism' and 'socialism' blamed, which would be a good trick, as neither would meaningfully exist for many centuries afterwards. We're often quite good at seeing something unfamiliar which we don't understand, seeing some echo of familiarity in it, and projecting all sorts of things onto it based on that familiarity.
> Calhoun’s big takeaway involved status. Again, the males who lost the fights for dominance couldn’t leave to start over elsewhere. As he saw it, they were stuck in pathetic, humiliating roles and lacked a meaningful place in society.
Sounds like most younger modern men that reached adulthood in the last 20-30 years: forced by women to uphold all the patriarchal requirements that benefit women - breadwinner, good career, good social status, pay for everything, take all the physical and emotional risks, etc. - yet are increasingly denied the very tools needed to achieve these goals… instead, they are faced with a myriad of barriers that they cannot control and are not permitted to object to, such as preferential education support for women, preferential hiring of women, preferential career advancement for women, disrespected status in society, becoming the default “villain” for anything that nerfs a woman, etc..
Not only does this underlie the societal conditions that many researchers are saying gives rise to 1ncels, but this is also the very reasoning why many men are giving up and “going their own way” -- they are being crushed between a rock and a hard place, and are being simultaneously punished for failing to perform while being forcibly denied the very tools needed to achieve said performance. So they reject it all as an impossible task that is maliciously anti-male and directly harmful to their own physical health and mental health. They turn away from society and women’s demands of men to focus on what truly matters: themselves.
These MGTOW become “the beautiful ones”, rejecting female entanglements and (frequently even) sex in order to properly take care of themselves in a society that actively hates them for the gender that they were born with.
> Women are supposedly falling into Calhoun’s behavioral sink by learning “maladaptive behaviors,” such as choosing not to have children, which “destroy[s] their own genetic interests.” Other critics agonize over the supposed loss of traditional gender roles, leaving effete males and hyperaggressive females, or they deplore the undermining of religions and their imperatives to “be fruitful and multiply.” In tandem, such changes will lead to the “decline of the West.”
