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.
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.
Scientists and universities with ethics put rules in place to prevent unethical behavior. People without ethics work for Tyson Foods and torture chickens for extra money.
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 offspring. Accordingly, I found this work greatly affected how I processed neuroscience material, and viewed violent behavior.
We must respect the little creatures that warned us of humanities possible future. So far, many communities seem to be following a familiar concerning trend:
> 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.
"seriously"? Scott uses humor to present some rather unsettling facts, and while I personally find his mannerism crass... the assertion remains plausible.
>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.
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.
Even if they did, the result would never be accepted. People will nitpick everything they can, from comparability to methodology, to ignore whatever may come out of such a study.
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.
I am not sure what results are there to reject? "Overpopulation exists"? "Overpopulation can be very dangerous"? "If you stress animals enough, they will start behaving strangely"? Those seem pretty trivial, perhaps even obvious.
There are also people doing parallels to human groups, but as other commenter said, it's not clear at all how mice social behavior relates to humans', given how different they are even in non-stressed environment.
The interesting parts of the experiment aren't the basic 'overpopulation bad' results. I think the interesting stuff is more like:
- what emergent, unnatural behaviors form? (e.g. the beautiful ones, isolated females)
- are these emergent behaviors tied directly to mouse psychology, or to more fundamental things also true of humans? (e.g. is the beautiful ones emergence due specifically to alpha-mouse ostracism behavior, or is this a more fundamental psychological urge to maintain control over what little is still controllable? - which has direct implications for humans)
- what tweaks to this system of, effectively, complex automata result in a stable equilibrium, dependent only on behaviors that are true of both mouse and man?
Questions like that would be hard to construct in an experimental setting, and it would take an insane amount of documentation and rigor to get those results accepted if it was a backyard experiment. With good reason, too. I'd take it with a huge helping of skepticism too. But do it right, and it'd be crazy valuable.
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.
The article discusses this: while there are some superficial similarities, the drivers ture out to be different, not similar, between human and murine populations.
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.
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.