41–50 of 59 posts
They had everything they could ever want for - except space.
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.
Anyone know if the Universe 25 results have been replicated?
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/
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.
Jesus Christ.
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…
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?
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…
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 u…
Anyone know if the Universe 25 results have been replicated?
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 offsprin…
> 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.
Anyone know if the Universe 25 results have been replicated?
Anyone know if the Universe 25 results have been replicated?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 offsprin…
(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.
>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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSHZG9blQQ
Best of luck, =3