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[KSig RC]

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

Drolefille, mice have been used for biomedical research for more than a century now. Even with the advent of increasingly sophisticated genetic engineering techniques and more powerful computer technology, mice have actually become stand ins for humans upon which it seems every imaginable disease or condition is being studied, along with compounds to treat them. Hardly a week goes by without some new findings about heart disease, cancer, obesity, anxiety ect ect. From the beginning, these studies are all based on mouse models. By some estimates 25 million mice are used in medical research each year.

These studies use "mouse models" for the following reasons (in this order):

-Cost
-Lessened "noise" in the data due to outside factors, whether they be genetic interference, antibodies, etc. (these are Knockout mice, remember)
-Ethical considerations (it's hard to use humans)

The following has never, ever been a consideration in mice studies:

-Proximity to human research/similarity to the human body (in literal comparison with other animals; this may be true when compared with yeast, not so much with monkeys)

I'm saying this to provide context to my responses to your later points.

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

I'm not saying mice are always the main source. Sometimes it depends on the study. Yeast, worms, fruit flies and even computer models all offer excellent insight into the workings of cell biology. We use mice a lot in school because they make better tools to study the immune, endocrine, nervous, cardiovascular, skeletal, and other physiological systems of humans and in my case, other mammals. Mice get many of the same diseases that humans do, rather it be cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, glaucoma, and to top it off, they even develop anxiety and aggressive behavior.

You're mixing your terms here. Cell biology is not similar to complex inter-system diagnoses of complex behavioral patterns (such as pheromonal interactions, or the existence of something as nebulous as "attraction"). Mice can be subject to diseases similar to humans, but that is simply because they are mammals - it is not some great, lucky advantage to the knockout mouse.

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

I know similar is not the same which is why I said 99% rather than 100%. I hardly think my information on mice is misleading at all.

Mouse studies can indeed be misleading, by their nature. Let's take a look, again, at the reasons for using mice:

Reason 1: Cost
-These studies can be replicated, improving their utility - however, the assays are cheap and can be run with few controls, leading to a large number of trials (and outliers) that people then post on places such as message boards as gospel (for example).

Reason 2: Lack of interference (the "knockout" quality)
-This is both the best and worst part about lab studies on mice - the lack of interference is the very reason why the assays do not have any direct applicability to humans. The "noise" in the data may actually be the very interaction that prevents human use of a particularly novel or innovative observation - read up on gene therapy and mouse studies for more information on how this can be a massive problem. Just in the examples you've used, the fact that pheromones influence mice (which have little to no sociological influences as we would know them) has almost no applicability to a complex thinking organism that is subject to hundreds of outside factors (including choice). The "noise" avoided through mouse assays is actually the "signal" we need to root out.

Reason 3: Ethical considerations
-Ideally, this should not apply to an attraction study.

So the bottom line: mouse studies can be quite misleading, and should not be considered "99%" at anything except for the direct application to mice, or as an object lesson to drive future research toward its empirical end.

The moral? We can talk about bowerbirds and compare behavior, but we fall prey to logical fallacies very rapidly in these connections. Particularly, sociological connections between man and other animals is often colored by selection and confirmation bias - is buying a nice car really similar to collecting pretty things? If so, why aren't we comparing females wearing low-cut tops to female bowerbirds? Are we seeing what we want to see out of the extraordinarily simple mating methods of mice versus humans?