
What Was the Mouse Utopia? (2017) [video] - neverminder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=HfNKFvHtA3g
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ALittleLight
I'd like to see a replication of the Mouse Utopia experiment. It seems to have
the character of a lot of the "Failed to replicate" studies in psychology and
sociology. The study finds a conclusion that is directly applicable to the
issue of the day (overpopulation and overcrowding in Calhoun's time) and has
an interesting metaphorical attention getting alarm to it ("We humans are the
rats!").

One problem that stood out to me is how the mice in Calhoun's experiment are
any different than any other kind of laboratory or pet mice. They are given
unlimited access to food and water - but, aren't all pets and lab animals
given all the food and water they want? What's special about these?

Another problem is that Calhoun does a lot of evaluating rat behavior. They
all eat together - is that abnormal? Some of the rats and lazy, and live by
themselves. Is that abnormal? Some rats kill their young and the infant
mortality rate rises as population density does. Is that abnormal?

I'd like to see a modern recreation of it, along with better statistical
representation of the data and the changes over time. If it's possible, I
think a control setup should be added, where the rats in the control
"universe" would have to engage in activities like their natural behavior to
get food.

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gwern
I recently took a longer look at Mouse Utopia and was not too impressed:
[https://www.gwern.net/Questions#mouse-
utopia](https://www.gwern.net/Questions#mouse-utopia) It's very confusing what
it actually showed. For starters, there's no such thing as _the_ 'Mouse
Utopia'; Calhoun ran dozens or scores of related experiments, it seems, and
only very briefly and cursorily described a few of them at different stages in
a handful of publications, which are about the only source for all discussions
of 'Mouse Utopia'.

~~~
notelonmusk
\+ unexpected confounding factors like
[https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.2935?&code=2968f10f-2f...](https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.2935?&code=2968f10f-2f78-4056-b360-df675bfe2ef4)

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mjfl
Very interesting, never heard of this before. I gave this some thought, and I
think I can come up with a simple reason for the observed behavior and also
why it does not apply to humans. Female mice mate with dominant, territorial
male mice who's role after conception is to defend the nest from the attack of
rival males, who will kill/cannibalize the babies if given the chance. At some
population density, there are way too many rival mice for a dominant male to
defend, and this reproductive strategy breaks down. The imagined limiting
conditions like food and housing were not the actual limiting condition of the
colony - the killer rivals were. Human females don't form harems under the
protection of dominant males, and thus this would not be a limiting factor for
humans.

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Arnavion
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGLFozNM2o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGLFozNM2o)
Here's another video, with more details about Calhoun's other experiments
before Universe 25, and historical context around them.

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shiltonx
People can talk about replication problems but the fact that this happened
even once is interesting. I would claim that the reason the rats went extinct
was because they were put in an environment that was far too different from
their natural environment to survive. The question for people is not how do
deal with overpopulation the question is why aren't we experiencing
overpopulation.

