The Great Mouse Mutant Meltdown FRAUD

An experiment famously found that when mice live in a perfect mouse paradise, were food is plentiful, and there a no predators to be found, they degenerate into a mutational meltdown, echoing the problems with our own society of plenty. But is all as it seems?

[malicant]

What the experiment left out was the presence of a group of goblin shrews who spread chaos by importing rats from other places.

[garystein]

Lab mice are already mutants to start with. Glad you pointed out wild mice. I learned that during covid. It's easier to manipulate results

[skitsschist]

You mean another textbook psychological study is bunk? Imagine that

[HarryG-man]

Don't care, still gonna spend my time cleaning myself and moving from one watering hole to the next.

[aegisreflector]

"Peace has cost you your strength: victory has defeated you."

-Bane

[martinheath]

A similar experiment conducted using rats inside a barren concrete and wire enclosure discovered that they would begin to drink from a water source containing class A drugs rather than pure water. The same rats when relocated to an environment with plenty of soil and greenery to dig in, they lost interest in artificial stimulants and reverted to drinking the fresh water.

[luciengrondin]

Someone should reproduce this experiment and make it live on YouTube. I'm sure this would have millions of views daily.

[QSLWCOM]

And in one of the mouse utopias, the mice spent all day looking at tiny mouse phones.

[WinterInTheForest]

Hard times create strong mice. Strong mice create good times. Good times create weak mice. And, weak mice create hard times.

[WJ]

i looked into it and immediately thought of inbreeding after seeing how few starting mice there where

[WhyDidntIInventYT]

There are fair criticisms to be made against the famous Universe 25 experiment. However, I wouldn't call it fraudulent. The key takeaway is that it demonstrates the behavioral sink, in which you can have all the resources you need, but you can still self-destruct through neurotic, dysfunctional behavior.

[gitte]

You should get Rudyard back on your podcast and talk with him about this, he's big into the mouse utopia.

[eddysgaming]

Did I miss the skit for this one?
The thought of Ed wearing mouse ears makes me chuckle.

[kaptainwarp]

Ok, but you can't deny that humanity is on the wrong track; nor that there has emerged a class of "useless groomers" among us.

[MichaelLeBlanc-pf]

The Ontario Science Museum had a display (6 ×12 ft ?) Cage years ago, left over from an experiment in which a pair of rats (male & female) were put in it with a set amount of food.
The rats prospered initially till limited food created stress and the rats began fighting among themselves for what ever the big rats did not eat, killing each other in the process. Stressed female rats ceased caring for their young as they competed for food. Ultimately only 2 big male rats were left over and they eventually died of old age.

[kubhlaikhan]

Fraud is the norm in social science not the exception.

[laststand]

I have not read the paper... However I have listened to a guy by the name of Rudyard Lynch over at Whatifalthist who talks extensively about this experiment.

I see a few problems with your analysis.

1 You assume there were 24 universes before universe 25... That is not necessarily the case. It could just have easily been named based on something completely different and arbitrary.

2 You assume that if overpopulation was not the cause of the collapse, the researchers observations of collapse were also invalid. A bad theory of why it happened doesn't invalidate the fact that it happened.(One of the scariest things about mouse utopia is that they never reached peak capacity)

3 You assume that the Replication Command(which you call evolution) cannot fail, it can. We have many examples of species that went extinct because they found themselves in circumstances and were unable to continue replication.

In conclusion, if the researchers did indeed skew their results(intentionally or unintentionally), it would be reasonable to doubt their work. However I did not find your accusations to be anywhere near bulletproof. Perhaps you should run your own mouse utopia experiment?

[noahbodhi]

Don't care about the genetics, the psychology is still applicable. Bottom line, our brains are wired to exist in a hostile environment. Take the hostility away and there is an impact. And it still applies to the behaviors we see now.

[kathrineici]

As someone who raised mice the fact that the mice acted like mice with no stimulation was extremely foreseeable
1) The mice were not gay, mice (both male and female) mount to establish dominance
2) Stress in mice leads to overgrooming, that’s what “the beautiful ones” were doing
3) Stress in mother mice results in her cannibalising her young because it’s more efficient for the mother to either recoup some of her energy by eating the babies or cutting her losses and just leaving, than it would be for her to continue raising doomed pups
4) Stressed mice fight and eat each other. Again, mice go cannibal really easily.

Why were they so stressed? Probably because they were trapped in a pit where there were no changes aside from continuous ammonia build-up and so they were completely under-stimulated.

[edmedeiros]

I’ve read that the reason the mouse utopia universes weren’t technically overpopulated were because they all mass migrated to only a few pens (cities), and this created a sort of artificial density which in turn caused the behavioral sink. The experiments may or may not be a fraud but you can’t deny that there are eerie similarities to how humans behave in overcrowded conditions.