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Anyone know if the Universe 25 results have been replicated?
Hans-Peter Lipp and colleagues have studied domestic mice reared and maintained in a large outdoor pen. I could only find this reference:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Some discussion then:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you want to torture mice in your backyard, I can't stop you, but 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 argument for their correctness are not useful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.