Post: #1

What happens when you create a utopia for mice with no predators, easy access to mates, bedding, water and food?

It turns out you create a vicious form of hell. Quickly followed by a mass extinction.





I came across this experiment in a post by my favourite blogger - wimminz.

He analyzes the experiment much more interestingly than I can. So I will just give a link to his thoughts:

http://wimminz.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/...-part-two/

Post: #2

Hell yea, I didn't know there was a video of this.

Post: #3

I'm pretty sure this is a dupe, but I'm also fascinated by this study. I think a major plague/war/famine/alien invasion is inevitable at some point in the next 1-500 years that devastates the population.

Post: #4

Perhaps space exploration is the most important human pursuit of the 21st century then. Either that, or WWIII.

Post: #5

The interesting thing is that alot of the mice end up becoming MGTOW - ie cutting themselves off from the stresses of life and just chilling doing their own thing.

One of the intriguing possiblites is that there is some hidden biological principle behind this - which we dont fully understand yet. A kind of apoptosis but which applies to society and not just biological cells.

From the blog above:

Quote:Calhoun said in an interview much later that it was almost like god / dna / darwin was watching, growth expanded to fill most of the space, eventually realised that this was a closed system with no way to breach the boundaries, and so the same grow and expand triggers that made the population squabble, ended up just turning off the lights and going to sleep and never waking again.

In effect, there were not enough possible moves or options left for the mice to evolve, it was a monoculture, and at some point some inbuilt trigger in dna flipped over to extinction.

Not all species that become extinct do so solely because they cannot eat and breed fast enough to overcome predation and environmental changes, many species that should have been able to carry on just quit.

Not enough moves left in the game.

Post: #6

What does this experiment have to teach us about human beings or human society?

There is an interesting and counter-intuitive answer to that question. The answer is this: nothing.

Never attempt to make analogies between things that are different in kind. These analogies are the bane of much of what passes for intellectual discourse. They have the appearance of depth or interest -- but it's nothing more than appearance.

They contribute nothing to actual understanding and in fact tend to impede it.

There is nothing more overrated and more useless than such analogies, or some of the just-so stories that contemporary professional philosophers like to spin out.

Post: #7

Animals follow the path of least resistance.
This is excellent in harsh environments because it ensures that they expend less (valueable) energy on unnecessary challenges, and also reduce the possibility of the getting fatally injured, giving away their location to predators and a host of other undesireable outcomes.

When you remove them from this naturally harsh environment for which they've evolved and put them in such an environment that reduces stresses, this same trait of choosing the path of least resistance backfires.... If one were to offer an over-simplified analogy, think of a fish being removed from water....there's air aplenty, but its biological adaptation of gills which help it absorb dissolved oxygen are rendered useless and leads to their annihilation.

Same reason why most civilized cultures eventually crumble into oblivion.



Edit : with ref to lizard's post --- humans are animals too. A LOT of human behaviour can be predicted or explained from experiments done on other animals.

May not perfectly match, but similar behavioural patterns can be identified. Such research does have a little advantage

Post: #8

Another problem they should have addressed is whether the poor, less educated mice were producing several times as many offspring as the hardworking mice, leading to a society of fat, lazy mice leaching off of a select few individuals.

Post: #9

Ha ha ha.
That was funny sweatpeas.

Post: #10

Funny point.

But in the experiment above - there was nobody to leach off - since ALL the mice were provided with ALL the resources they needed.

Post: #11

I feel, mostly intuitively, that the human race will lose most of the population due to low birth rates. It's already happening in many developed countries. Ugly females are expecting a mate who is way hotter than they are and males are not reproducing with women who are less attractive. Proliferation of porn and artificial sex will help to deal with our instincts but with no offspring! Further development in Tech will result in a Matrix like society - a virtual experience! I personally cannot wait for sex with a sex robot! ))

Post: #12

The problem here is that people are pointing at the abundance of resources as the cause for mouse ennui. The actual collapse was caused by overcrowding in a finite space. The mouse metropolis had a carrying capacity of 3200 mice, but that would have essentially been filling the entire space with mice. Really what the experiment proved is that animals tend to get nutty if they are forced into a more crowded population than they naturally prefer, it just happened that the limit for crowding was 2200 in their theoretical 3200 mouse space.

Really the all experiment proves is that cramming people into crowded urban environments causes antisocial behavior. Of course this can explain the grass eater phenomenon as well, since Japan is a pretty crowded place.

Post: #13

What I conclude:
Exponential growth until all resource usage is maximized and population is maximized. Because there is too much competition (which means stress), young mice opt out of the game completely or their descendants can't cope with the stress anymore. Stress means, that no matter what you do, you can't win at the game of life. This will be written into the genes.

In humans it is known, that early childhood stress makes people more prone to depression/burn out or other psychological problems. And we also know, that these problems can be given to the next generation. you will most likely find a study proving that people born/living in cities (simulating the overcrowded mice experiment) are more prone to depression.

-> a negative feedback cycle of gene expression leads to societal decay

I don't think humanity will face this fate as a whole, rather some cultures or countries.

Interesting enough, most countries with a maximized resource use per citizen (most western countries, USA on pole position) are below sustainable reproduction rate indicating the decay phase for our western culture.

Post: #14

That old guy from :03-:24 looks an awful lot like this dude:

Post: #15

Didn't agent smith talk about something like this in the matrix

Post: #16

It's all true, but modern society and social dynamics are more complex than in mice, even though in some places, them rodents are catching up because of sheer population stupidity, but still.

This being said, all we have earned from the moment we are born is the promise that one day, we will die. So what gives? If anything like this goes big while I am alive, I'll be around eating popcorn, pointing and laughing, because this is clearly would come from people making their own death bed.

Post: #17

"Certainly, as far as I can tell, wimminz and niggerz aren’t actually human, it is far more useful to think of them as some sort of alien body snatcher copies, they just imitate rational thinking beings, rather than having any ability to indulge in individual rational thought themselves."



Anyway the rub is mice aren't aware of their own mortality or for that matter the mortality of their species, while we make charts and graphs when our numbers dwindle by mere percentages.

Post: #18

(01-12-2014 07:58 PM)Jackreacher Wrote:  "Certainly, as far as I can tell, wimminz and niggerz aren’t actually human, it is far more useful to think of them as some sort of alien body snatcher copies, they just imitate rational thinking beings, rather than having any ability to indulge in individual rational thought themselves."



Anyway the rub is mice aren't aware of their own mortality or for that matter the mortality of their species, while we make charts and graphs when our numbers dwindle by mere percentages.

Neither are mouth breathing, doritos eaters or most modern women for that matter.