4 ms·

>> a 4½-foot cube—with everything a mouse could ever desire They likely desired a larger cube.

• oh-4-fucks-sake 4y ago
  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.
• generalizations 4y ago
  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.
  • osigurdson 4y ago
    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.