Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

Post by swayvil » Wed, Jun 29, 2022, 12:53 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #48

> In earlier utopias involving rats Well, there's a phrase you don't see much. This does feel like a kind of retro quasi-Malthusian concern these days, though. In practice, populations tend to stabilize as the economy develops, and the earth is now expected to hit peak population within decades.

Post by throwaway4aday » Wed, Jun 29, 2022, 12:59 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #37

mlatu wrote: post #28

i think this shows only that social species' behaviours are fine tuned to the environment they have evolved in and drastically changing said environment requires the species to adapt in order to survive. i feel like there should be a pen size above which such an experiment might run indefinetly. but my gut tells me: no matter the size, it will always eventually crash and burn because mice can't "talk it out" i think…

Humans are more adaptable even without explicit communication. We seem to vary our reproduction rate based on the life expectancy of our offspring. Lots of children during and shortly after war, or when child mortality is high, but much fewer when it's near certain that our offspring will live to old age. Though we have some other problems like tribalism that might be down to the environment we evolved in, and not ha…

Post by throwaway4aday » Wed, Jun 29, 2022, 1:08 PM UTC

NeoTar wrote: post #27

ben_w wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in the sense that people are bad with numbers and timescales, and that the fears themselves directly led to funding for research that happened to be successful at creating affordable solutions. The fictional population of NYC in Soylent Green (released 1973, set in 2022) was 40 million, whereas the actual population today is 8.8 million, but even 40 million would give it about the population density of Manila to…

> The fictional population of NYC in Soylent Green (released 1973, set in 2022) was 40 million, whereas the actual population today is 8.8 million, but even 40 million would give it about the population density of Manila today and wouldn’t look like it was portrayed in the film. Another example is Isaac Asimov's Trantor, a world-wide city enclosed with globes which requires the resources of multiple agricultural worl…

Post by throwaway4aday » Wed, Jun 29, 2022, 1:11 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #42

barry-cotter wrote: post #23

Has this ever been replicated? Were detailed enough records kept that we be sure this happened more or less as described or is it one of the famous experiments that were at best described in a completely misleading way, like the Zimnbardo Stanford prison experiment, or wildly and willfully misinterpreted, like the murder of Kitty Genovese?

Very good question. The Behavioural Sink Wikipedia page doesn't list any independent replications, though Calhoun studied the phenomenon from 1947--1995, a period of 52 years. I'm going to emphasize independent replication as having the same principle investigator study a question doesn't meet that bar. The failure to replicate (or of Wikipedia to note any replication which might exist) is curious given the notoriety…

Post by lordnacho » Wed, Jun 29, 2022, 1:18 PM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #22

onion2k wrote: post #2

The global population of Earth has pretty much doubled since July 1968 when the experiment was run. Evidently the fears of overpopulation they had were unfounded.

If we were half as many as we are today, we would need half as many resources as well. You can cut a cake in however many pieces you want, but eventually there won't be much to go around.