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Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

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Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#31

Post by rsynnott »

jayski wrote: post #4
adamwong246 wrote: post #3

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

Ah, Mouse Ceaușescu.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#32

Post by Terr_ »

ajaymenon0 wrote: post #23

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 MMOR…

> 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."

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#33

Post by Terr_ »

dredmorbius wrote: post #28
osigurdson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

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.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#34

Post by Sparkyte »

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.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#36

Post by Asooka »

ggm wrote: post #27

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 r…

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.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#37

Post by Asooka »

adamwong246 wrote: post #3

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?

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.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#38

Post by Asooka »

synecdoche wrote: post #17
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to torture mice in your backyard, I can't stop you, but let's not pretend it's valuable research.

> let's not pretend it's valuable research 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 argu…

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.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#39

Post by Asooka »

osigurdson wrote: post #26
fifticon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)

#40

Post by jhbadger »

Asooka wrote: post #35

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.
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