Anyone know if the Universe 25 results have been replicated?
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
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.