One of the worst jobs i ever had, occasionally required us to drown some mice. Excess population / euthanized "feeders" for pet snakes. The method was to put several mice into a small wire cage, and then submerge the cage in water. Usually I filled a bucket with hot water, beforehand, and made this operation fast as possible. Dunk and done.
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.
Once in grad school I went to a talk where another grad student was presenting on his fear research with mice. Many powerpoint details unfold of the hell he and his advisor had contrived to make the mice chronically afraid, and to be able to quantify the fear induced and its effects. I learned that when mice get scared enough they shit excessively. In the presentation of results he lingers on a graph, and says, for effect: "That's right, they were scared shitless."
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.
I've seen similar things. Besides many experiments not being remotely worth the harm they cause (poor design, niche topics without applications, dead end checking-all-the-boxes, etc.), they leave a mark on the people who conduct them. Some leave that sort of research out of distaste or disgust, and some become callous. It struck me that it inculcates an inhumane indifference to suffering. And numb scientists. It ultimately damages both the people and the science. Yet incentives (monetary, career progression) can push people past boundaries, and with time, erase them.
There have been a couple times where I've said something like "I'm sorry, I'm not seeing what's so funny here" when people are laughing about something serious. You can either look like a humorless dick or you people snap out of it and then respect you for acting like an adult
> That silence is still among the top few of my regrets.
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.
I don't get it. Are you angry that he performed those fear studies, or just that he made a joke about it in the presentation? If you see the importance of the results gained from the former, you should have no problem with the latter. Scientists need a way to cope with their emotions as well.
It is not uncommon for people whose work involve a lot of death and suffering to indulge in dark humor. It is not that they don't care, quite the opposite in fact.
Someone I knew caught a raccoon and tried to euthanize it in a freezer which I quickly put a stop to and instead opened a CO2 bottle in the freezer which quietly put an end to the issue.
This was in 1986, in a pet shop. Not large scale enough for dedicated processing equipment, we used the same vacuum sealer for brine shrimp and crickets and mice and etc.
> 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.
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.
Alternate take: sometimes you perform whatever small act of grace that you can manage in this world, even if it's futile or inconsistent with your other actions.
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.
Everyone agrees drowning is really not humane but nitrogen isn't approved either (rodents are not humans and so they might react to things like inert gas hypoxia differently).
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.
My daughter got an internship at a research lab this summer - where they have thousands and thousands of research mice and they kill several mice every day. She said CO2 works on adults and therefore that's what they use. But CO2 doesn't work on baby mice and is considered inhumane. Instead they use scissors and cut off the baby mice's heads. It's to be done swiftly so it's like a guillotine. The labs are continually monitored to ensure the animals are stressed as little as possible.
"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?
Swap out the researchers with AGI/ASI robots and swap out the mice with humans, and you can see one of the many scenarios that cause people to be concerned about AGI safety.
One of those topics where the meta is richer than the actual science. I remember my Dad mentioning as a child. The public interest is interesting in itself.
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’s interesting to me at least that the group’s population crashed completely to zero and not to just a low number that then began climbing again. This is undoubtably a consequence of mice not being able to escape from the chaos due to the small size of the territory, but I do wonder what the minimum viable size would be to allow for a full boom-bust-boom cycle to occur.
I don't think it's that surprising, especially as an occasional result.
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.
The population didn't crash to zero, Calhoun merely claimed it was going to. But despite researching it for decades while being well-funded, what wound up happening (in that, as in almost all of the mouse experiments) remains a mystery because Calhoun published bizarrely little.
We don't really know because Dr Calhoun didn't keep research notes or samples, published few scientific papers on his research, never captured or shared significant statistical data, had few controls and little regard for cofounds, and almost entirely failed to tell anyone anything about his other "universes".
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.
> That said, what was he actually trying to learn?
> 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!
It would seem like the more obvious lesson would be, "when in conditions very different from what that species evolved for, new and often serious problems will arise". Which is, no doubt, true and even relevant. But, since we evolved for conditions very different than rats did, I'm not sure how much more can be concluded.
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.
What was surprising is that the mice didn’t end up evolving some traits and instincts optimized for the new conditions. I would’ve thought they would learn new behavior after a few generations to thrive in the new environment. This makes me think that a post scarcity environment may not be enough to ensure the survival of a species
Not sure, but it occurs to me that some lab animals have reduced genetic diversity compared to wild types of the same species. Sometimes this is by design, to reduce variation, sometimes just because the way the lab animals are bred happens to make a few of them the ancestors of the general population (especially if you're buying all your lab mice from the same place).
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.
This is the fallacy of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger". Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, adversity reduces strength rather than increasing it, especially if it happens too frequently and too severely. Evolution/adaptation works over long periods of gradual change, which is why the effort needed to survive, say, a global climate apocalypse varies widely based on whether the same amount of warming happens over 10 years, or 100 years, or 1000 years.
Has this ever been replicated? Were detailed enough records kept that we be sure this happened more or less as described or is it one of the famous experiments that were at best described in a completely misleading way, like the Zimnbardo Stanford prison experiment, or wildly and willfully misinterpreted, like the murder of Kitty Genovese?
As it happens, there were some (now very obscure) attempts to replicate it. They failed. I cover (and jailbreak) them in my criticism of Mouse Utopia: https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia
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.
You can add the Robber's Cave experiment and The Third Wave (which seems to be mostly fictional) to that list as well. After WWII, there seems to have been a certain desire among some people to show that the average human (or rodent, here) could quickly be turned evil given the right circumstances, and a number of charlatans popped up who were more than happy to manipulate things in order to feed this desire.
So it wasn't an utopia. The mice had enough water and food, but they ran out of living space. It's so obvious I can't understand nobody pointed it out yet.
there's never gonna be "enough space" for animals that do not understand the concept of overcrowding and planned parenthood.
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.
There's the ever-so-remote possibility that this was precisely the point:
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.
I think the point is that the population would continue to grow until they run out of living space and go extinct regardless of the exact size of the experiment.
Surprisingly, this is the best article thus far in pointing out the issues arising from a lack of space. This is the only article that seems to even address the lack of space.
> (Incidentally, after Universe 25’s collapse, Calhoun began building new utopias to encourage creative behavior by keeping mice physically and mentally nourished. This research, in turn, inspired a children’s book named after Calhoun’s workplace—Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, wherein a group of rats escape from a colony designed to stimulate their intelligence.)
One of my favorite books growing up - and indeed among the very few I read voluntarily.
i think this shows only that social species' behaviours are fine tuned to the environment they have evolved in and drastically changing said environment requires the species to adapt in order to survive.
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.
Humans are more adaptable even without explicit communication. We seem to vary our reproduction rate based on the life expectancy of our offspring. Lots of children during and shortly after war, or when child mortality is high, but much fewer when it's near certain that our offspring will live to old age.
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.
> We seem to vary our reproduction rate based on the life expectancy of our offspring
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 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."
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.
when was the last time you had to fight with someone using just words and how do you think would that interaction have been if you and your counterpart had not used words but teeth, fists and fingernails instead?
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
I really enjoy this series. I feel like it is one of the few stories that really explores what it would like to be an uploaded mind without a significant amount of handwaving. There's still some sci-fi elements to it but they seem believable.
There were only 8 mice in that cube when the experiment started. Seems like that would be more than enough space for them. That the mice overfilled their living space through reproduction is not a limitation of the experiment, but an outcome.
A fairly obvious outcome with exponential growth - eventually there would be too many mice and bad things would happen. The fact the the population eventually went to zero is somewhat interesting but it would be necessary to run the experiment many times to draw any conclusions on that point. Overall the knowledge gained was not nearly worth the suffering that the mice endured.
One step further: they needed a larger cube. Seems like the study reasoned that providing unlimited food/water ruled out "resource scarcity" as a cause for decline. Space is very much a resource.
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.
Readit News
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaak_Panksepp
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.
Dead Comment
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?
Deleted Comment
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?
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!
Dead Comment
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42950440-heaven-s-river
https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse
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.