New rat and old rat - handicapping the rat race

The Age Blogs: Sam and the City:
"Yet Dobbs reckons that a new study on the rat race (carried out by a psychologist and graduate student at Concordia University) seems to contradict the theory that women will only get lucky if they're part of the rat-race process."

I thought that bit about old cow and new cow - Someone Like You (2001) - was creepy. But here's a fairly serious discussion of human relationships based on the mating habits of rats in laboratory cages.

There are vast differences in the brains and endocrine systems of rats and men and millions of years of separate evolution. There is another important reason to be wary of such comparisons - the artificiality of the laboratory environment (for the rats, it seems to suit the researchers well enough).

During the late Victorian period, the science of animal behavior seemed to be making great strides based on observations made in zoos. Many years later, when dedicated researchers began to replace hunters and trappers as the principal sources of observation of animal behavior in the wild, we had to unlearn a lot of what had been learned from those observations in zoos.