Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)(sciencehistory.org) |
Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)(sciencehistory.org) |
Unlikely. Most of the greenhouse gasses were released by the wealthy countries. Climate-influenced population-reduction advocates usually focus on high birth rate countries (especially in Africa, hmm), yet eliminating a single birth in North America forestalls the emissions of five people in Africa.
We should be encouraging people to use more (non-fossil fuel) energy, not less.
I guess a controlled MMORP with certain constraints could also lead to some understanding of group dynamics in a similar vein.
I find myself imagining this exchange:
"We put beavers in an environment where there wasn't any tiresome wood to gnaw on because everything was already perfectly constructed. Bereft of challenge, they all starved to death from dental anomalies. Obviously this means humankind requires adversity to survive."
"No, dude, you just failed to understand beaver physiology."
What I read in this is that models for the natural environment with "a couple of simplifications" generally crash fast because real world systems are much more complex.
Maybe what he needed for rodent heaven 25 was a more complex situation to model? Add Cats? Fleas? Diseases? Maybe heaven demands adversity?
> Incidentally, after Universe 25’s collapse, Calhoun began building new utopias to encourage creative behavior by keeping mice physically _and_ mentally nourished.
I think I'd be more interested in the follow up work. Were they even able to identify and accomplish this? And how did the rats perform any better?
Take exactly the same experiment but add as little as just a bunch of wheels for the mice to run on and I'm certain the results would be healthier.
Some discussion then:
No animal or human deserves to be compared to as their nature while still part of the same kingdom is distinctively different.
Man understands what walls are, what they do, what they mean. It is conceptual and tangible in thought. Pets, the family cat for example, knows only that it is an obstacle. There is no further meaning or allusion, it is to them in all ways just an obstacle.
The idea of this experiment succeeding depends entirely on those in the experiment knowing the rules of the test.
That happens with everything. You'll often see people on the internet blaming the collapse of the Roman Empire on... well, anything the writer doesn't like, really. I've seen both 'capitalism' and 'socialism' blamed, which would be a good trick, as neither would meaningfully exist for many centuries afterwards. We're often quite good at seeing something unfamiliar which we don't understand, seeing some echo of familiarity in it, and projecting all sorts of things onto it based on that familiarity.
Sounds like most younger modern men that reached adulthood in the last 20-30 years: forced by women to uphold all the patriarchal requirements that benefit women - breadwinner, good career, good social status, pay for everything, take all the physical and emotional risks, etc. - yet are increasingly denied the very tools needed to achieve these goals… instead, they are faced with a myriad of barriers that they cannot control and are not permitted to object to, such as preferential education support for women, preferential hiring of women, preferential career advancement for women, disrespected status in society, becoming the default “villain” for anything that nerfs a woman, etc..
Not only does this underlie the societal conditions that many researchers are saying gives rise to 1ncels, but this is also the very reasoning why many men are giving up and “going their own way” -- they are being crushed between a rock and a hard place, and are being simultaneously punished for failing to perform while being forcibly denied the very tools needed to achieve said performance. So they reject it all as an impossible task that is maliciously anti-male and directly harmful to their own physical health and mental health. They turn away from society and women’s demands of men to focus on what truly matters: themselves.
These MGTOW become “the beautiful ones”, rejecting female entanglements and (frequently even) sex in order to properly take care of themselves in a society that actively hates them for the gender that they were born with.
And I don’t blame them one bit.
Jesus Christ.
Hans-Peter Lipp and colleagues have studied domestic mice reared and maintained in a large outdoor pen. I could only find this reference:
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.
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E
Have a wonderful day, and stay curious about the world... =3
> 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.
>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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSHZG9blQQ
Best of luck, =3
Mice's evolutionary history has evolved them as a small, vulnerable, prey species. In the absence of predation pressures, rather than evolve to a well-balanced and well-functioning society, the same adaptations which are beneficial where most juveniles (and many adults) are killed by predators --- high sex drive, high fecundity, extensive foraging, occasional conflict among mice --- become pathological of themselves.
Too little water kills. Too much water kills.
To much predation destroys mice communities. Too little predation destroys mice communities.
And by extension, similar lifting of long-established, evolutionarily-shaping constraints might affect other populations negatively. The implications for human populations, whether localised (e.g., urban crowding) or global (overpopulation, resource conflict) are pretty clearly indicated in Calhoun's work.
Did the lack of adversity and hardship cause them to fall into fatalistic fugues? Nah, It's just an unmet physiological need that isn't generalizable to humans.
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.
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.
- 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.
Have a great day, and remember to get out for a walk everyday to meet your neighbors. =3
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.
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.