[23B1]

Dr. Calhoun's research, if you can call it that, has been roundly debunked due to flawed experimental design, lack of replication, anthropomorphizing, etc.

If you're interested in more up-to-date and relevant research on the sociological impact of the internet, I recommend checking out Sherry Turkle and her associates, or reading some stuff from RAND on psychological war, and then branching out from there. Jaques Ellul is also a more 'liberal arts' way into this field that I'm betting you'd enjoy.

[Joel_Mckay]

"Psychological war" sounds very dramatic, but Ms. Turkle is a sociologist with a specialization in human personality study. Hardly qualified to be an evolutionary neuroscientist, but maybe she is a good therapist.

"Not my monkey... not my circus..." as they say... =)

Indeed, Dr. Calhoun had many peers with better resources to study the phenomena. I agree that his initial interpretation was unexpected, but the later data, several papers, and peer-review is likely of better quality. Note the film clip documents a follow up study done with "Rat Utopia" that covers several of the unanswered questions of whether ecological carrying capacity features.

Personally, when I last reviewed the work I was more interested in shifts in the rates of aggression in pseudo-tournament species. Yet my interests shifted to neuromorphic computing long ago, and unfortunately it is off-topic for this thread.

Have a wonderful day, =)

[23B1]

I enjoyed this exchange.