Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/mouse-heaven-or-mouse-hell/

by ajuhasz • 2 years ago

69 57 2 years ago

floxy2• 2 years ago

Anyone know if the Universe 25 results have been replicated?

theamk2• 2 years ago

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.

generalizations2• 2 years ago

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.

mensetmanusman• 2 years ago

Humanity is trying to as we speak.

robwwilliams• 2 years ago

They have not. And now not possible due to justified animal welfare concerns.

Hans-Peter Lipp and colleagues have studied domestic mice reared and maintained in a large outdoor pen. I could only find this reference:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21454292/

hoseja• 2 years ago

justified

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.

Joel_Mckay3• 2 years ago

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E

Have a wonderful day, and stay curious about the world... =3

gwern2• 2 years ago

(Rat Park doesn't replicate either.)

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.

gwern2• 2 years ago

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.

floxy2• 2 years ago

Nice. Exactly the type of thing I was looking for. Thanks!

adamwong246• 2 years ago

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?

jayski• 2 years ago

What if you temporarily remove the neglected pups, care for them while young, teach them to operate in a "normal" rat society and then reinsert them?

throwup238• 2 years ago

That's how they train the League of Assassins so I think that generally ends in a Ra's al Ghul revenge scenario...

rsynnott2• 2 years ago

Ah, Mouse Ceaușescu.

newzisforsukas• 2 years ago

You could...

golergka• 2 years ago

You could really fit at VaultTec!

Asooka5• 2 years ago

You can, in fact, buy a dozen pet mice and build a pen like that. In fact that's what breeders do regularly. There are no laws against it.

nisegami• 2 years ago

This reply is an infohazard.

Log_out_• 2 years ago

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?

fuke• 2 years ago

Calhoun's observations were subjective and unscientific. This sadistic "experiment" only demonstrated his biases.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

(2022)

Some discussion then:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31905218

mattigames• 2 years ago

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)

gumby2• 2 years ago

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.

ajaymenon0• 2 years ago

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.

Terr_2• 2 years ago

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."

osigurdson3• 2 years ago

They had everything they could ever want for - except space.

fifticon• 2 years ago

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.

osigurdson3• 2 years ago

Are they compulsive water drinkers? Maybe I missed it in the article but it seems strange - how do mice near by rivers and lakes survive?

crooked-v• 2 years ago

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.

ggm• 2 years ago

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?

cobertos• 2 years ago

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?

shermantanktop• 2 years ago

There’s a documentary about it called “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.”

Asooka5• 2 years ago

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.

rsynnott2• 2 years ago

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.

Sparkyte2• 2 years ago

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.

throwway120385• 2 years ago

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?

Sparkyte2• 2 years ago

Possible but that also means you have no way to convey the difference between the idea of wall and the unchangeable object that is the wall.

The idea of this experiment succeeding depends entirely on those in the experiment knowing the rules of the test.

Asooka5• 2 years ago

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?

jhbadger• 2 years ago

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.

wiseowise• 2 years ago

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.”

Jesus Christ.

Corvus• 2 years ago

The Australian cartoonist Stuart McMillen wrote a good cartoon called Rat Park about this experiment; https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/rat-park/

fnordian_slip• 2 years ago

It's not about the same experiment, unless I am mistaken, but it's a great comic nevertheless, thank you for sharing.

rekabis• 2 years ago

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.

And I don’t blame them one bit.

Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

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