Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?
sciencehistory.orgOne 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.
I almost said something similar, the old Nietzsche quote about how if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back. I didn't want to be even more dramatic, but I think you are exactly right. There's a cost to such things, and the externalities run deep and wide. All you can do is be very deliberate that the trade is worthwhile.
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
In a room full of people whose entire career is based on torturing animals?
> 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.
I'm angry because if we agree that that work was important (not sure I do, but not the issue), then the sacrifice of basically torturing a bunch of animals to death in service of science should be treated soberly, with reverence. I'm kind of baffled that you think that I, or anyone, should have no problems with the described conduct.
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.
Angry at himself for failing to publically point out and engage in discussion about the cruelty and terrorizing that was conducted, and well-understood by other science practitioners, and also the much of the audience present.
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.
Laughing at the suffering of an animal that you caused isn’t exactly what I would call “dark humor”. It’s just wrong.
If you could reverse time and say (or do) anything you would have wanted, and it wouldn't affect your future negatively,
then what do you wish you had said?
(I too find that joke distasteful)
I had a narrative bubbling in my head at the time; can't remember exactly, but it was something like: "Jaak Panksepp was just here, and you know his work better than I do, which over several decades has established the rich emotional lives of mice. It seems to me that, given that, laughing at the terror you've caused these animals seems inappropriate. What do you think?"
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.
Fucking hell did I just read?
I've just read Flowers for Algernon again a few weeks ago. Don't pull my heart strings like that.
If this is such a common need, I can't help but think they should've invested in a controlled atmosphere killing setup to reduce the panic.[0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation#Animal_...
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.
Hypothermia is a "better" way to go then co2 asphyxiation if your temperature is sufficiently cold, probably hard to do for a raccoon since they can survive winter. Next time use nitrogen or helium, or like most people do, shoot it.
I actually thought that freezing was one of the most humane ways to ... euthanize an animal
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.
Very well said
I'm not vegan but I think about it all the time.
Same boat.
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.
Disclaimer: I’m “vegan”, for some definition of the word.
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.
I'm strictly vegetarian, I will not ever eat meat, but as for vegan parts this is my strategy and it works really well!
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"
I am not a vegan but I think it would be useful for every meat eater to humanely kill and prepare an animal to eat at least once in their life. Having done so, I think I learned a lot about death and whether or not I was willing to eat an animal after preparing a few myself. I also think it is important to be aware of our own mortality and to think about it a healthy amount. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
I've thought about the mortality angle quite a bit, for the reasons you say, and can see how that would be useful -- even something as simple as fishing can force you to confront some realities about life and death and how we relate to the world. Did your behavior change after your experience?
I would say I do eat less meat but that is more for health reasons. Also, I am more grateful to eat meat when I am more aware of the sacrifice that it takes. As far as the realities of life and death, I would say that I am pretty comfortable with them. I can't generalize that, however, as faith is very important to me and I do have confidence in my life after death.
Why try your absolute best to not think about it, instead of taking some steps to reduce your animal consumption and actually feel better about it? I get that something like mortality is an intrusive thought that you can do nothing about, but it's pretty easy to take steps to reduce meat consumption and actually feel better about it.
Ignoring suffering is much easier than relieving it.
Caring about others isn't fun.
Why not suffocate them with nitrogen or co2 or something?
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.
[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-...
20 years ago I worked in a place that killed them with acetone, covering the mice with a lab paper then wetting the paper with about 50 ml acetone per 50 animals and closing the lid. It was fast.
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.
I'm curious why the CO2 doesn't work on the babies. Is their rate of breathing just much slower?
> they use scissors and cut off the baby mice's heads. It's to be done swiftly so it's like a guillotine.
Yes, that sounds fine. Much more humane. Carry on.
As long as the ethics committee OKs it.
It sounds like they had put some thought into which methods cause the least suffering. It doesn't sound like they were trying to skirt the edge of what the ethics committee would allow, which is how I read your comment. Please let me know if I have misinterpreted.
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.
Absolutely - this is a world-renowned medical research school and since they always have interns you can expect this question has been asked many, many times. They feel the need to explain it in their orientation because they know some of the students are going to be shocked by the procedure.
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.
Your assumption is that the mice must die.
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?
Do you mean in general? There are two reasons given in this thread: medical research and pet (snake) food.
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.
Feeding snakes?
at the research lab?
Why not have research snakes? And a research mongoose to eat the research snakes? And research jackals to eat the research mongoose? And research lions to...
> But CO2 doesn't work on baby mice and is considered inhumane.
> 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!)
$5 Home Depot bucket
$189 nitrogen gas tank
Plus any regulatory, liability, etc. issues that go along with having & regularly using stuff that could also suffocate your employees.
The things franchise owners will do to save pennies.
Why hot water? I would have thought cold or preferably lukewarm water would be more humane.
Fast and doesn't damage the mouse as snake food. If the water is hot enough the shock kills them very quickly.
Hmmm, well, lukewarm for me anyway please.
Dying quicker is better.
I'm pretty sure pain features in the equation as well time.
what a rollercoaster of a story. Thank you for sharing.
Why would you agree to do such a job?
"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?
I hate to use this phrase, but I think this is what the kids are calling "dripping with privilege" these days.
Why not use some more humane method of euthanasia, such as a nitrogen atmosphere?
What kind of hell prevented you from lashing out at this cruelty?
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.
Almost all of science fiction is "what if aliens/robots did to us what we do to other animals".
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.
> Consider that surviving severe overpopulation is trauma
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.
Word you’re looking for is probably “epigenetic”.
Thank you! Now not being able to think of this word doesn't have to bug me for the rest of the day...
> If you had multiple colonies connected by 500m of tubing, this "distance" between territories might allow for "local" booms and busts to occur.
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.
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.
But there wouldn’t be chaos anymore by the time population dropped to a few hundred.
Between the two moments of equal population something must have changed in the population, either genetically or, IMO more likely, culturally.
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?)
Very good question.
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.
Surprising given that the cost to maintain such an experiment would be fairly low.
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.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/yellowsto...
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.
From TFA.
Feels like after the 3rd iteration you could call Calhoun a sadist.
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.
You are right that there are certainly countless factors, and it's a messy system. You can clearly see economic troubles suppressing birth numbers, or the introduction of the pill that drove most Western societies to a birth rate below the replacement level. You can also see clear differences caused by politics/ideological systems. But the coupling between birth rate and death rate seems the strongest overall predictor, with the lag between the two driving many population booms. As a consequence, Western nations saw the biggest decline in birth rates in the beginning of the 20th century [1]
I always thought effects such as environmental chemical pollution (estrogen analogs), overreliance on nighttime lighting / artificial temperature regulation and dietary issues leading to obesity (both previous items reducing fertility), and increasing cost of raising children (leading to higher investment in fewer children) are some of the main factors leading to decreases in birth rate in developed nations.
>"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.
I was following that until the language thing. How does talking, make more room?
It doesn't make more room but it would help people develop a society that adjusts for the new environment.
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
Humans haven't had a good track record. I don't imagine mice would do any better.
Humans have a poor track record compared to what? An ideal zero-conflict state? Sure. Animals that kill each other because they cross paths during breeding season? Not at all. Compared to them, we are masters of negotiation and compromise.
One half of the mice could talk among themselves and go to war with the other half, perhaps.
Ukraine and Russia is a good example… oh wait!
Related:
The book "Heaven's River" by Dennis E. Taylor (part 4 of the bobiverse series) contains an interesting Utopia, similar to a generation ship.
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.
>> a 4½-foot cube—with everything a mouse could ever desire
They likely desired a larger cube.
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.
If I was to start a social network I’d call it Universe 25. Maybe shorten to u25.
Funny, people had been posting the "John Calhoun rodent experiment" meme on 4chan for the last year or so. Guess someone took notice.
> In earlier utopias involving rats
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.
We can shift "peak population" forward by instituting progressively dystopian measures.
"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.
But I mean, the point is, we're _not_ shifting it forward. It is moving backwards (and smaller; most estimates are now for a peak of about 10bn, vs far more extravagant estimates in the past), closer to the present than would generally have been expected a few decades ago. In the 50s, many people didn't think there'd be a natural peak population at all; they were going with full Malthusianism.
In practice, population growth tends to slow down and eventually reverse more or less naturally in advanced industrial economies.
Real Mouse Heaven would've included a big Burning Man camp to work on so they'd have something to do all year.
Ever since learning of the Mouse Utopia (where did "mouse 'heaven'" come from?) experiment, I found it interesting that its results spoke more directly of LOCALIZED overpopulation. In a human context: cities. Many of the pathologies observed in the experiment are very starkly displayed in human cities. I've always found it odd that those most interested with overpopulation concerns also advocate for cities as part of a way to solve the issue, when they really only exacerbate the problem.
I guess its thinking of overpopulation as a phenomenological effect on the individual vs the global effect of all of us on the environment. Interesting point though, I had never thought of it in that way before. People all over the world are already living in Blade Runner levels of density.
>living in Blade Runner levels of density
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.
I don't have any firm conclusions on the meaning to be gleaned from Universe 25, but man, that article may have been the most interesting thing I've read in a while.
Contrary to what most written accounts say about Calhoun’s most famous experiment, he did not provide his mice with unlimited resources. The provided plenty of everything except for physical space. This article does a better job covering that angle where other articles barely mention the issue or describe the problems that stem from it.
I knew it would be this experiment. I was just commenting (in a different thread) on how decent people underestimate how evil evil can get a few minutes ago too.
Take a species that’s got a high reproductive rate due to high infant mortality
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
Who are our "beautiful ones" I wonder. The asexual compulsive groomers.
Grooming could be the mouse equivalent of entertainment. Movies and videogames and such.
Hikikomori: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
NEET is the term I see most commonly with some variation.
The global population of Earth has pretty much doubled since July 1968 when the experiment was run. Evidently the fears of overpopulation they had were unfounded.
A number of important ecosystems are now much closer to collapse than they were in the seventies. I don't think that we can say that fears of overpopulation were unfounded. The evidence is quite clear that we consume a large number of resources much faster than they replenish.
Only in the sense that people are bad with numbers and timescales, and that the fears themselves directly led to funding for research that happened to be successful at creating affordable solutions.
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.
> 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.
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.
You could explain away the discrepancy by saying that the 45 billion number is the number of permanent residents. As the seat of a galactic empire it would likely host representatives and their staff and families from tens of thousands of worlds, would probably be a hub of interstellar trade with many merchants and the crew of their ships staying for weeks at a time, a major tourist and religious hub with billions of visitors and pilgrims, countless numbers of galactic citizens would also make the journey to petition the emperor for various things. The list could go on for a mile and could result in a much larger effective population at any one time.
> It has a population of 45 billion, and a surface area of approx. 40% that of Earth.
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.
It’s hard to take making sense of population numbers with the use of fictional material.
But the consequences of too many young males and not enough females, are quite similar.
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.
I remember this reporting coming out over a decade ago.
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.
Yes, the problem with comparing the study on mice to people is that mice iterate much quicker than humans.
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.
Overpopulation hits places like India and Bangladesh badly. China and Europe's population actually seems to be declining and they seem to be quite well off.
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.
>and Europe's population
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.
A quick Google brings up this list: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fer...
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.
Have a look at the graphs in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Netherlands and notice how the growth percentage has only just reached 0%, despite fertility rate having plunged all the way to near 1.5 since the 1970s. What's more, many still predict population growths and the government is still stimulating it through subsidizing children and giving tax breaks to immigrants. The Netherlands is on the cusp of declining, but not declining yet.
If you look up the history of fertility rates, most of developed Europe plunged similarly, yet population kept growing well up to now.
That's helpful. I always assumed that fertility rates linked to population growth, but forgot things like immigration.
> Europe's population
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...
Note that this growth is not driven by the descendents of those people who were in the country in 1960, but by immigrants and immigration.
If we were half as many as we are today, we would need half as many resources as well. You can cut a cake in however many pieces you want, but eventually there won't be much to go around.
I'll bet there's some kind of hysteresis in that. Things are rarely as nice in a company that has just reached 50 people vs one that has come down to 50 people.
Same goes for a lot of orgs.
Hard to agree with this when faced with the overwhelming environmental degradation we see globally.
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.
I wouldn’t say they’re unfounded, humans just evolve more quickly to adapt through technology, giving access to previously inhabitable places. There’s still a lot of these left though overall quality of life would get worse in terms of living space and better in other areas like medicine.
Unless you consider that episodes of individual psychosis seem to have risen exponentially every decade since then..
There are numerous cases of individual psychosis associated with much lower population densities as well.
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.)
The (famous) experiment seems to prove that mice are happy with the benefits of relatively high levels of social organization until the burdens of close quarter living and constant company drain them of their will to live and their ability to thrive. It amounts to a pretty strong argument for American style independence and personal liberty. The implication, I think, was that it was supposed to also endorse the laissez-faire economic system undergirding those things, even if only as a necessary evil. As a mammal who hates confined spaces, I can mostly get on board with that.
The famous experiment seems to prove that a large number young people are bad for social stability in a mice society. That amounts to a pretty strong argument against infant healthcare /s.
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.
A young populace is indeed closely linked to violence.
The book "The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World" by Paul Morland has some interesting thoughts on the topic.
The problem with that assertion is that it's so simplistic that it's meaningless.
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.
> Having more young people doesn't magically cause more violence.
Most likely it's just more hormones.
There's also the theory that humans caused the mammoths to go extinct not by hunting them to extinction directly, but by killing the adult males (because they have the largest tusks). Without a strong dominant presence to keep them in check, juveniles going through musth became so violent that they started killing each other and the females they pursued.
I find that sarcasm is always best when you can somewhat plausibly argue that it's serious.
You can't generalize too much, nor can you assume humans will just "fix it for everyone" like the author seems to imply we are some enlightened, higher species.
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.
> The famous experiment seems to prove that a large number young people are bad for social stability in a mice society.
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...
... and because of this, mankind has developed an interesting game called "war"...
Though this creates a bit of a problem if you're no longer having wars.
There is a theory that precisely this is why Putin decided to try and take over Ukraine with most of the troops coming from piss poor regions of Russia. For Putin, it likely still is a win-win scenario: the fallen soldiers won't protest in their home regions and demand reforms, their families will worship them as heroes and even if the war fails in the end and only Crimea and Donbas get under Russian control [1], it will still have been worth the effort.
[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.
As the article itself says, "Ultimately Calhoun’s work functions like a Rorschach blot—people see what they want to see."
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.
I'm fascinated that you can get to this conclusion from the result of some kind of mice prison experiment
Even more fascinating is that the OP and several commenters don't seem to have read the article...
(In mice)