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.