The Mouse Dystopia

Here's a rather nice little video on Universe 25, a.k.a. the Mouse Utopia :

This is something I've come across many times over the years. I'm sure I've read at least one long read on it, though I'm not going to trawl through everything to find that again.

Anyway, the basic story is simple. A bunch of mice were given unlimited resources, perfect conditions, and the result was an absolute disaster. Not only was the result a population collapse to total extinction, but the mice demonstrated weird pathological behaviours : some became constantly aggressive, others retreated from mouse society altogether, some became obsessed with personal grooming. Mothers ate their own young and reproduction completely ceased.

The popular reading is that comfort kills. We need something to strive against, the thinking goes, something difficult to prevent us sliding into sloth and indulgence.

A more sophisticated interpretation, as the video presents, came from the original investigator. What went wrong was not excessive comfort, says this alternative interpretation, but a lack of clear social roles. The mouse society collapsed because they had no meaningful activities to structure their little lives around; in effect they failed from sheer ennui.

Both of these are tempting readings from the brief popular description I presented. It's certainly hard to see people taking literally deadly selfies and not see more than a little resemblance to the grooming-obsessed mice who beautified themselves to death. This is part of some deep appeal in the human psyche to a state of decline. Like the myth of Atlantis, there's something perversely romantic about the notion of a society which reaches the heights of glory only to fail and never return.

And yet, it's all bollocks. All of it.

After some prolonged discussion with ChatGPT, I've come to the conclusion that what's really going on is likely far, far simpler, and any resemblance to modern Western society is entirely coincidental. What U25 tells us about excessive comfort and the need for meaningful social roles is, I think, exactly nothing. This doesn't mean that these things don't matter. Quite likely, they do. But it does seem that U25 can't tell us a bloody thing about their effects either on humans or, importantly mice. The experiment appears to be yet another case of a popular finding having serious flaws and being massively over-interpreted.

Major caveat : ChatGPT provided many links to support its assertions, but I haven't checked them. I would expect a small percentage of these claims to be wrong, so by all means, do go through the full linked discussion and check them for yourself. However, unless it's made a really serious mistake, it seems very unlikely that the overall claims here are anywhere near as flawed as what really went on in the hell-hole that was Universe 25.

With that in mind, it looks like this a utopia only in an incredibly narrow and extremely stupid sense. Yes, it provided the mice with unlimited resources, and yes, in principle it could have supported a larger population than the maximum value it reached before the collapse. But two absolutely crucial factors are missing from the popular narrative that fatally undermines any meaningful attempt to map the mice to men.

First, there were no good controls for density. Earlier and later experiments did hold the population at lower levels by removing mice, but only when the density had reached a level which was already known to be above comfort levels : these too saw similar behaviours in the mice to U25. At no point does there appear to have been any attempt to either hold the population stable at a very low level, or even at a moderate level but during the phase while the numbers were still increasing (i.e. before the self-destructive behaviours stated to happen).

This blows the idea of "excessive comfort" right out of the water. The mice were given little stimuli beside other mice and food. No attempt was made to provide enough space for the mice to live without having to constantly deal with other mice : sure, they always had enough to eat and drink, but they had little way to meaningfully escape from other mice when conflict arose. The idea that this is "excessive comfort" is absurd : it would be more like being locked in a restaurant with thousands of other people and expecting a flourishing society because you could have as much to eat as you wanted. Hate your neighbour ? Who cares, another steak will make you feel better !

This is not quite to say that sheer, simple, mouse density was the dystopian driver. It might well be that with a suitable rearrangement of the furniture, more compartments and better division of the space, U25 could have indeed sustained its nominal maximum mouse population. But it does look highly credible that density is the root cause : for any given configuration, if you have so many mice that they can't escape each other, eventually you'll get continuous unbearable interactions. Maybe a better configuration could, somehow, have allowed a sort of stable mouse version of Biosphere 2*, where they'd naturally regulate their own breeding, but that's a very different and more sophisticated social engineering proposition.

* I'm aware that no breeding occurred in Biosphere 2. Bisophere 2 meets Love Island meets Big Brother, then.

The more obvious difficulty is that here the mouse were imprisoned with no way to leave of their own accord. They had no choice but to endure a hell of their own breeding they simply couldn't foresee. The limitless food becomes irrelevant if psychologically there were just too many mice.

Interestingly, there were experiments done in which problematic mice were removed, but unfortunately, only limited data is available on what happened both to them and their parent colonies. It does seem that there were changes in the transplanted mice, but how much and over what timescales is unclear. On the colonies, less data is available : they didn't recover, but by this point the mice had been living in hell for a prolonged period. It seems entirely plausible that they were now permanently psychologically damaged.

And possibly, physiologically damaged as well. This is the second crucial factor that goes unreported, one that's hiding in plain sight. For the Wikipedia article contains something so obvious that overlooking it renders the whole experiment null and void: the cages were only cleaned every six to eight weeks.

Two months ! Two months of two thousand stinking mice. That's not a utopia at all. That's a cess pit. 

And this was already known in 1973. I can see how things like control experiments for density might get overlooked, but this is surely such an egregious failure of reporting that journalists deserve a good chunk of the blame here. Even accounting for a possible belief that mice are essentially just little furry mechanical machines with no psychological needs (such mistaken ideas being more common the past), not recognising the need for basic sanitation is a crazy thing to leave out of the story. 

"Ah yes, this experiment shall be absolutely perfect for these mice. They're going to have a fine time of it, breeding their little hearts out, having all the food they could want, no predators, no way to escape their neighbours after a fight and only having to worry about cleaning every two months."

This is palpably a silly experiment, but the way it's been reported is demonstrably awful. It means nothing for the mice and even less for humans.

And these two factors work in tandem. Had the mouse density been kept lower for a sustained period, the effect of the cleaning frequency could have been examined more carefully. Perhaps at a lower density, mice would naturally avoid dirty areas, which means the situation could be extremely non-linear. It's possible that the population of a lower density could be sustained for a longer time or even indefinitely at the same cleaning frequency, but at a higher density, disease might become prevalent all the more rapidly. Without that density control, we don't know if there wasn't some innate flaw in the rest of the experimental setup, something else – another unknown unknown – that was causing madness in the mice. Given that mice, usually, hardly the most difficult animal to maintain in captivity, that possibility doesn't look all that unlikely. Something had clearly gone very, very wrong in Universe 25.

Unless something ever repeats the original setup exactly, and does the appropriate control experiments, we'll never know what really went wrong. This seems very unlikely to ever occur because the thing looks strikingly unethical and the possibility of mapping the result to humans is essentially impossible. I've suggested density, but I don't mean that there's a simple linear relation between density and mouse comfort levels. Nor can we eliminate other possibilities : maybe the mice would still have exhibited pathological behaviours even at low levels. Clearly, though, pet mice don't usually go insane like this, so I rather doubt it.

All we can really conclude from the Mouse Asylum is that if you give mice unlimited resources, take little account of their psychology, only clean them every couple of months, and make no attempts to control their population, you get a catastrophic hell-hole leading to extinction. ChatGPT tried to call this a "valid observation", but to my mind this has all the same validity as observing that a rock is grey or that a table is made of wood. Nothing unexpected occurred here. It offers no profound psychological insight besides "miserable mice all died". The additional tragedy is the mythmaking that grew up around this complete and total non-result.