Quote:
Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek
Consequently, understanding the genentics of the immune system isn't just a matter of inserting a gene into a mouse and waiting to see what happens. We must instead learn how genes behave as part of a complex network. It's also not trivial to simply transplant human cells into a mouse. You make great points, but they do make great models for studying humans and other mammals.
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I really don't think you read anything I wrote - it's almost as if you simply regurgitated some notes from a class you took last semester, and I'm not sure why . . . perhaps I was unclear (I've been known to have that problem), so I'll reiterate, and hopefully not come off as a jerk or anything:
Mice do not, in fact, make great models for studying humans. Mice make acceptable models when conditions dictate a certain kind of assay or a certain "scale" is all that is available.
This is easy to prove, by counting the number of FDA approvals that have happened because of mouse studies (or, in a rather less snarky fashion, the number of failed attempts that were deemed a potential success after animal trials), but that's neither here nor there.
Running out the "mice use pheromones and ultrasound signals" line, similar to using peacock feathers or gay gorillas, has a strong chance of confirmation bias - Occam's Razor here. It's a fun thought experiment, but I think you're carrying it too far - it may be that I'm more skeptical, but I also may simply have more experience or a more realistic view.
I think you're too trusting of scientific findings that are of low real-world utility, and far too trusting of theoretical connections between animal sociology/mating behavior and human behavior, and I think this is connected to a misunderstanding of how to use research such as mouse studies. See: the mouse tar-painting studies for a great example of how to use mouse research - it even has epidemiological connections, so the complexity is much higher than usual.