Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?(sciencehistory.org) |
Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?(sciencehistory.org) |
I don't think we should generalize too much from mice to men. Deriving social policy from what works for mice seems like a very bold move to me.
The book "The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World" by Paul Morland has some interesting thoughts on the topic.
That assumption can also backfire. A highly adaptive species capable of grouping up gives leeway for some extreme solutions which will solve the problem for a subpopulation at the cost of another. Humans might solve the problem, but not in the way which is best for the entire population. Plenty of examples in both the past and the present.
For what it's worth: there are strong indications suggesting a link between a large number of young, especially male, people and the emergence of social unrest [1][2][3].
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26271410
[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/young-people-key-defu...
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/an...
Even if mice and humans really were the same, the article also demonstrates that there are many different hypotheses that fit most of the observations, but all of them seem to be falsified by some of the observations.
Having more young people doesn't magically cause more violence. Those young people don't exist in a vaccuum. Adolescents generally don't have an income and are thus dependent on their families to provide for them.
Families having more children also means they have more expenses and need to allocate more time to parenting and "family time" for each child to still receive the same level of care. Additionally there are many economic and cultural factors why poorer people are more likely to have more children than wealthier families. Availability of contraception and abortion further exacerbates this. "More young people" generally means poor people having more kids. Even if the number of children increased equally across all economic categories, this would still mean more additional poor kids than more additonal rich kids because of the size of those groups (and because not-wealthy-but-not-poor families could end up poorer because of the additional expenses).
But sure, young people cause violence.
Most likely it's just more hormones.
[1] Note that I wish for Russia to be completely driven out of Ukraine and to be treated as a warmonger like Germany was after 1945, this is unfortunately not realistic.
One day I came across a cow orker attempting to do this job (I had been busy and it was usually my task); they'd put the cage in the sink and were gradually filling the basin with cold water, mice swimming and grasping each other and etc. Panic and horror. Nasty.
Somehow, one mother mouse wound up on top of the pile, holding one almost weaned baby. As the water passed her knees she stood up and held the baby over her head. Prepared to die and use every moment left keeping the kid alive.
I had to adopt her and her baby after seeing that. They were never exceptional as pet mice but I still feel good about saving those two.
Hilarity. The room bubbles with laughter. Just enough transgression.
I remember in that moment bubbling with rage. A famous and well-regarded paragon of the field [1] who had recently come to the university to give a talk spent his career characterizing animal emotions, especially of mice and rats. He revealed their rich emotional worlds in glorious detail. The presentor, his advisor, many of us in the department knew -- or should have -- how un-funny the joke was. We were perfectly positioned to know it.
Despite knowing what I knew, I didn't say anything. That silence is still among the top few of my regrets. I guess I learned the weight of doing the right thing in a packed room full of people with contrary opinions, and learned that I was way less strong / bold / principled than I had believed myself to be; which was remarkable, as that bar was already low.
Don't be too hard on yourself. The fact that you remember the incident and feel that regret shows a lot of emotional maturity and self awareness. I doubt many others that attended the talk that day even remember it.
then what do you wish you had said?
(I too find that joke distasteful)
I've just read Flowers for Algernon again a few weeks ago. Don't pull my heart strings like that.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation#Animal_...
Weird sentiment. It's like when South American paramilitaries would exterminate entire villages, but adopt one of the children. Does that make it easier to go back to killing them, or harder?
edit: I could see it both ways; harder obviously, because you enjoy your pet and you see the other mice the same way you see your pet. But maybe easier, because that mouse earned life by acting in a way you registered as humanlike compassion, and the others failed to, so deserve their fate.
I'm not a vegan, and I try my absolute best to avoid thinking about what we put animals through. It certainly sits in a specific category of intrusive thoughts. The only real analog to this in my mind is being aware of my own mortality; I just avoid that thought and shove it out of my mind. Occasionally my comparatively relaxed life is harshly interrupted by an awareness of these facts and I'm ripped back to these realities for just a short, terrifying moment. Graciously, a distraction is always readily available.
CO2 is common in labs though lab rats/mice do show aversion to CO2 which is interpreted to mean that it causes distress. So there's been ongoing debate for 20+ years over how humane CO2 is and what the correct flow rate should be and if oxygen should be added (or not) or other gasses (or not).[1]
Something physical like direct concussion/blunt force trauma followed up by another method might be better[2] (needs more studying) but there's also issues with physical methods because they require more skill to do correctly (or tools/machines developed to negate the skill factor).
Also operators dislike physical methods compared to gassing[1] so what's most practical might end up the standard[3] even if it may not be the most humane.
I mean, theoretically if you could instantly crush a mouse, faster than brain/nerve signals can travel, that would be humane, right? But then a human has to deal with a gruesome crushed mouse.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5035945/
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00236772221097...
[3] https://www.avma.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/Guidelines-...
$189 nitrogen gas tank
"Because it's my job!" <- if someone paid you an obscene sum of money to bonk random people over the head with a baseball bat, would you take it? No? Then what's the justification for torturing mice?
Not the the science isn't interesting. Population/behavioural studies like this are quite interesting. Animal behaviour is interesting, especially group behaviours where dynamics can play out.
That said, what was he actually trying to learn? If you take the same colony, and manually removed a few hundred juveniles every week... that's basically a mouse farm.
So, we know from both logic and evidence that "overpopulation" is a thing that occurs. Organisms multiply at exponential rates, and there must be hard limits on growth somewhere. Meanwhile, rodents as especially known for boom/bust cycles. Is it surprising that behaviour gets weird during "peak mouse" events? Mice aren't cannibalistic. The colony was protected from disease. Food didn't run out. Eventually, it's so crowded and everyone is stepping on one another. Breeding becomes unsuccessful, and that's the limiting factor.
What's the alternative, that the cube becomes literally full of mice before crashing? That mouse society adopts a super slow breeding rate to stabilize populations. What happened was, ultimately, a compromise between these two.
In any case, if the goal is analogy to humans... where's the work. If it's a scientific endeavour, how do we get from insights about mice to insights about people?
It does point out, though, the importance of being skeptical of any other scientific study done in rats, that hasn't been replicated with several other mammalian species. Or at least, skeptical of applying the "lessons learned" to humans.
So, they might have had a better chance of evolving behavior more optimized to the situation, if they had more genetic diversity to work with. Just an hypothesis.
OP is a bad writeup. He should be ashamed to write such an uncritical piece which says nothing you wouldn't find in either the Down The Rabbithole YouTube video (which seems to be patient zero for the resurrection of the Mouse Utopia myth) or the Wikipedia entry. The problem with Mouse Utopia is not that it has been interpreted in different ways by later pundits, but that it's probably bullshit to begin with. (How thoughtless do you have to be to note that it was the 25th experiment in a very long series of them before/after the behavioral sink experiment, and then not immediately wonder WTF happened in the >24 other experiments and then wonder why you can't find any information about any of them?)
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 and significance of the Rat Utopia studies.
That's the point of the experiment: in a food rich environment with no predators and no diseases, without human intervention (or intelligent planning if you prefer) everything is gonna deteriorate to the point of no return.
Nature is all about balance and we humans do nothing to follow that predicament, so if we are not careful and let things go by themselves, we risk of giving birth to hell on Earth.
Take the Yellowstone example.
Yellowstone is not a small and confined space and yet when wolves disappeared, herbivores, moose in particular, started growing in number exponentially, posing a threat to the ecosystem because, with no predators around, young moose could freely walk all over the park and started eating too-young trees, basically preventing them from growing.
Then wolves were re-introduced, and even though it's still unclear if the damages caused by moose can be undone, they at least stopped things from getting worse, cause wolves mainly prey on moose.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/yellowsto...
But the thing is, this wasn’t Calhoun’s first rodent utopia. This was the 25th iteration. And by this point he knew how quickly mouse heaven could deteriorate into mouse hell.
From TFA.
One of my favorite books growing up - and indeed among the very few I read voluntarily.
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 the only possible lesson here is: if you send a generation ship to alpha centauri, you better make sure they all have at least one common language.
They likely desired a larger cube.
It's no different than the naïve reasoning around government-run housing projects: "You have food, water, and a tiny space to live crammed among 1000s of other people--what more could you need"? Didn't this spawn aberrant, violent, unhealthy behavior too? Wasn't (at least in theory) part of the solution to stop doing ultra-ultra-high-density housing? (Given, it's not like the government executed on re-housing all the project-tenants into lower-density housing--they often simply dumped them back into the streets.)
TL;DR: It's mostly obvious why ultra-high-density projects (and prisons, and concentration camps, and slums) set people up for failure; 256 tiny nests in a 4.5ft cube sounds a whole like a housing project.
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.
"The city" is one such measure.
We can also sacrifice quality of food, air...
And imagine how many we could pack in if everybody stayed at home and played on their computer.
In practice, population growth tends to slow down and eventually reverse more or less naturally in advanced industrial economies.
It's interesting both that they do that and that we've been so conditioned to think that it's somehow a necessity. I once watched a breakdown of population and housing, and the author of the piece calculated that everyone currently living on earth could live in a one-story comfortable family house, with a yard and space for community parks and gardens, and the entire population of the planet would fit inside of Texas, with some tens of thousands of acres left over in the state. It blew my mind, and made me really ponder the nature of why we live the way we do in some cases.
Jam them into a small enclosure that dramatically changes the infant mortality rate
Watch with glee as overpopulation makes the ecosystem a toxic hell
Great science /s
Grooming could be the mouse equivalent of entertainment. Movies and videogames and such.
Consider that surviving severe overpopulation is trauma. Survivors are physically and/or psychologically sick. They're not good breeders and at this point.
Happens frequently in aquariums. Guppies breed like guppies. Overpopulate, then die back. The proximate causes can be varied. Maybe there's an ammonia spike, oxygen deficiency or other consequence of overabundance.
When the "crash" happens, survivors tend to be a precocious bunch. They're past breeding prime, and probably injured by the events of the crash and its precedents. Starting a colony with "poor stock" is always more difficult, and that's what you now have.
It doesn't have to be overpopulation that causes a crash. Say you accidentally pollute the water with soapy hands. Some fish will die today. Some tomorrow. Dead fish rotting is also polluting. Fish surviving the ordeal will probably have reduced lifespans and breeding potential.
My unqualified guess is that most extirpation events leave survivors, usually in less than ideal shape. The technical extirpation happens later, as survivors gradually drop off without successful reproduction.
Good question about minimum population size for boom/bust cycles to occur. I suspect this is more about environmental richness than pure numbers. Some predation probably stabilizes things, and some boom/bust might be possible. If you had multiple colonies connected by 500m of tubing, this "distance" between territories might allow for "local" booms and busts to occur.
Between the two moments of equal population something must have changed in the population, either genetically or, IMO more likely, culturally.
It also doesn't help that the two peer-reviewed studies that tried to replicate his results failed to do so. In many of those experiments the populations reached stable sizes, some without first experiencing a crash and others only after doing so. Some of the loosely-described "aberrant" behavior Calhoun claimed was never observed... not that we can be sure of that because Calhoun never gave us scientifically relevant observations of that behavior, only colloquial descriptions.
It seems clear now Calhoun set out to achieve a specific result and worked hard to achieve it. Then people with an ideological axe to grind on all sides fill in the blanks to claim it proves their position.
Calhoun for his part went to his grave claiming that mice/rat over-population experiments performed with inbred lab mice strains were in actual fact great models of human behavior and bemoaned that people didn't take his ideas seriously enough by rearchitect society to fit his conclusions.
> So, we know from both logic and evidence
Just wondering where evidence comes from, if not experiments? I, for one, find the results of the experiment surprising and useful instead of the "logic" and vague notions that we might come up with by theorizing.
> how do we get from insights about mice to insights about people?
Science is a whole lot of looking at, studying, and cataloging things, and the "insights about people" aren't necessarily the goal. Rather, that part seems so often biased to support a worldview, philosophy, or political agenda that I hope we leave it out more often!
Though we have some other problems like tribalism that might be down to the environment we evolved in, and not having a common language would make those a lot worse.
I don't think the life expectancy of the offspring is the only factor. Birth control certainly contributes, education is known to as well, wealth, working status and legal equality of women, and now there seems to be a whole new set of influences on the younger generations. It also doesn't seem to be a finely tuned feedback system, if anything it seems closer to the messy outcome of Universe 25 where reproduction broke down due to poor socialization and rearing and an overabundance of stressors.
I suspect that if a generation ship wasn't launched with a monolinguistic population a Creole would rapidly develop and the end result would be a new common language.
assuming you had the same standing to each other prior to the fight, would you two be able to interact the same afterwards, regardless who won?
it doesnt make more room, but it allows for compromises
The book "Heaven's River" by Dennis E. Taylor (part 4 of the bobiverse series) contains an interesting Utopia, similar to a generation ship.
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.
With sufficient industrial farming effort[0] and only existing technology, we could support something like 10 trillion on Earth, but if we did that then everything that wasn’t a farm would look like the top of the Wikipedia list of highest density city districts.
As for the correspondence between the rat experimental world and the human world, as the article itself says:
> Given these wildly varying (even contradictory) readings, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that personal and political views, rather than objective inquiry, are driving these critics’ outlooks. And indeed, a closer look at the interpretations severely undermines them.
Also, we aren’t mice, so while we are doing various — and in some cases, unhealthy — things in response to our world of high abundance and low child mortality, we are doing different things, more slowly, and with the ability to discover and respond to the big picture.
[0] the material requirements are on par with paraterraforming the Moon, because the first step is “make enough greenhouses for most of the land on the planet”, but it could be done.
Another example is Isaac Asimov's Trantor, a world-wide city enclosed with globes which requires the resources of multiple agricultural worlds to sustain it. It has a population of 45 billion, and a surface area of approx. 40% that of Earth.
Do the calculations, and the population density is, as Wikipedia says: "similar to the current population density of Germany or Connecticut. " I can't speak for Connecticut, but Germany certainly doesn't feel crowded. Even in central Berlin we have a huge amount of green space.
Even Coruscant in Star Wars, with a population of 1 trillion people (1 000 000 000 000) has a population density less than New York City.
The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching: Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations.
Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as well. Barely recognized, the ramifications of too many men are only starting to come into sight.
“In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,” warns Li Shuzhuo, a leading demographer at Xi’an Jiaotong University.
We are seeing tbe consequences of this in tons of ways, be it the rise of authoritarianism and incel culture, to region-specific issues for China/India.
If you tweak the variables just a little, things change massively, so I think the article gets it right in saying that it's dangerous to draw conclusions. Even drawing conclusions from my previous paragraph.
Where are you getting this from? Loads of countries are still rising in population, mostly due to immigration (birthrates of natives are below replacement rates).
>and they seem to be quite well off.
I wouldn't call Europe 'well off', unless your definition solely relies on "well, at least it is a developed country". We're facing multiple crises in several countries, and the younger generations are the ones most likely to pay the price.
Same goes for a lot of orgs.
Between extinctions 1000x the normal background rate, microplastics & chemicals poisining food supplies, climate change, oceanic accumulations of garbage twice the size of france and growing exponentially, growing water shortages, topsoil erosion, etc etc etc... it is not clear that those fears are unfounded.
Wisconsin Death Trip is one reasonably well-known collection of such instances:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip
I'd be interested in knowing what the basis of your statement is, and how you're considering reporting / observation biases.
(Note that I'm actually concerned with overpopulation and various psychological / sociological impacts of same. I'm simply highlighting that psychosis and antisocial behaviour is not exclusive to this particular population pattern.)
It's worth noting that I don't think saying that would have affected my career. I didn't say it because I didn't have the guts to stand up to the mob. Thus the guilt.
I think he retconned this up a bit in later stories, after people had pointed out the problem. But yeah, it's a weirdly common problem in science fiction; for whatever reason few authors bothered to check the density of existing cities before declaring a weirdly sparse world-city.
Generation time in (lab) mice is about 9-11 weeks, while in humans living in modern societies it takes between 20 and 30 years.
To have actual consequences on society at large we need to wait at least two generations, so obviously in such a long period of time people won't notice the build up, like they do in the short time span it takes for mice.
It happened with climate change too.
A surgeon, while operating with all diligence and conscientiousness, may from time to time kill a patient. That's life, it's table stakes to having surgery at all. The notion that it's cool if she jokes about killing the patient to "cope with her emotions" -- esp in an auditorium full of people -- is just fucking ... I dunno what to tell you if you think that.
Recently there was an article posted on HN about how trauma experienced by parents are passed down to children through (a term that means it's related to activation of genes, I believe, but not DNA itself... I thought it was metagenomics but upon looking at the definition I don't think that's it). Perhaps the trauma of overpopulation activated or deactivated some genes which in turn reduced reproduction rate in offspring.
I was thinking the same thing. From the article I got the impression that the final collapse happened because all the survivors were the same age, and too old to spawn a new generation. Semi-separation would at least break the synchronization.
Yes, that sounds fine. Much more humane. Carry on.
As long as the ethics committee OKs it.
As to possible alternative methods, those include freezing, which could be quite prolonged and painful, and blunt force trauma, which could be difficult/ambiguous to perform correctly and confirm correctness every time.
My daughter did say it's done so fast and the mice are so accustomed to being handled there doesn't appear to be any fear on the mouse's part and there doesn't appear to be any suffering, let alone needless suffering.
Funny anecdote - the first time she was in the lab when they were doing this she hadn't had breakfast that day and had a light dinner the night before and she fainted from low blood sugar. Took her a couple of days to convince them no, she was fine, she just let her blood sugar get too low.
Given that its the case, you then wonder about the most effective means of killing them.
But, pushing back on your assumption, what value can there possibly be in killing baby mice?
> Instead they use scissors and [swiftly]
oh snap!
Mice must have a high nervous conductance rate and as small as they are, what do you reckon how quickly it had to go through for there to be no impulse to speak of? (ask her!)
I might have been mistaken in saying "Europe" as a whole but European countries are at the bottom of the list.
It also seems that the bottom of the list has some economically struggling families, so this correlation could be mistaken. Fertility seems to be a lagging indicator - if someone can't afford a two bedroom apartment, they're just unlikely to have 5 kids.
If you look up the history of fertility rates, most of developed Europe plunged similarly, yet population kept growing well up to now.
The growth rate has certainly slowed in the last 30 years or so. From 0.98% in 1960 to 0.37% in 1990 and 0.12% in 2020. But, yes, it's still growing overall.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/europe-popula...
Candidly, I think that reduction in animal suffering is worthwhile, but you get diminishing returns quite quickly. I’d suggest only doing things that are easy.
For example:
- While grocery shopping you’re choosing between two types of burgers with similar cost and enjoyment: pick the one that causes less suffering.
- Your tires need to be replaced for a camping trip this weekend: don’t stress about trying to find vegan tires.
- You like cow milk and non-dairy milk the same amount: snag the one that you feel better about.
- Your favorite crackers have some trace amount of milk powder in them and all of the alternatives suck. Buy them.
Over time, the number of things that are “easy” will increase, and in my experience it’s way more practical than trying to engage in vegan perfectionism and googling things like “which cars are vegan” every time you need to buy something.
it's pretty easy these days, too. veg foods are prolifically available, and oat milk is damn good, even in my morning cappuccino.
it becomes something that is positive when it's always a minimization and hueristic rather than a ruleset and guilt-ridden.
essentially, "I'm vegan but i don't stress it"
Caring about others isn't fun.
I expect I don't need to explain why it's best to kill the mice humanely for medical research which involve dissection of some sort.
For snake food, it's best to feed mice that have been euthanized. Feeding live mice is cruel to the mice, who experience terror right before death, and there is also the possibility that a struggling mice could injure the snake.
