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Not everything needs to be about politics, some people actually talk about science when they talk about science.

Yes, humans are mammals, but not all mammals are the same, so the things that are true for one species are not necessarily true for other species. More precisely, when you measure some effects, it's not just about "true or false" but also about "how much".

For example, imagine learning that some magical pill makes a human life longer, with zero side effects. Before you start celebrating, you ask "how much longer?"... and you learn that the answer is 5 seconds. So, the statement is still technically true, but what seemed like a good news became quite useless.

Mice are different from humans. They are smaller, they live shorter. As a consequence, some interventions that cause big changes in mice, cause technically nonzero but actually very small changes in humans. So small that the difference from zero is negligible for all practical purposes.

There is a lot of fascinating research that can make life much better and longer... for mice... but has almost no effect on humans. This is why "in mice" became a meme, because quite often research is reported in a way that makes readers think it applies to humans, when if fact it only applies to mice (or it is yet unknown whether the effects on mice will also be confirmed with humans).




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