[tomohelix]

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.

[theamk]

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.

[generalizations]

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.

[Joel_Mckay]

Some folks like to leave out the more disturbing parts of the follow-up work to try to justify antisocial impulses.

Have a great day, and remember to get out for a walk everyday to meet your neighbors. =3