The Xzyl mutant mouse is resilient, optimistic, and romantic in nature

I submitted something I wrote on my blog, "Subject hates herself and engages in self-destructive behavior," to lablit.com. While the post was billed on the lablit.com site as being about "genes, behavior, and self-experimentation," I had in mind other things when I wrote it. The post wasn't about self-experimentation. It was an attempt to satirize the way behavioral geneticists try to explain something as complex as animal behavior in the context of one gene.

It was also a commentary (albeit very thickly veiled) about the irrationality of us humans when we think about our own behavior. We rarely analyze our own behaviors in the same terms we would analyze that of the animals that biologists study. Maybe there are good reasons for that, but let me explain where I'm coming from.

I'll do this by invoking my previously-mentioned fictional gene,Xzyl. Here I'll describe results from fictional experiments with Xzyl mutant mice, but I'll do it using the words we'd use to describe the same behaviors in humans.

The Xzyl mutant mouse is an interesting mouse indeed! When it was faced with a learning task in which it could avoid a painful stimulus by choosing a certain path in the maze, it kept making the wrong choice each time, in all 20 of 20 trials. It did this despite the pain being rather severe. We checked whether the pain circuits in the Xzyl mutant were intact, and found that it can definitely feel the pain. The Xzyl mutant mouse, like most other mouse strains, takes a long time to recover from the pain. Nevertheless, the Xzyl mutant keeps choosing the wrong part of the maze.

This shows that it has an optimistic nature. Some might call it a hopeless romantic. One day we're sure the Xzyl mutant mouse will be able to find happiness, not, of course, by making the right choice, but by persistently plugging along the same (incorrect) path it has always chosen. Its positive outlook in life is an inspiration to all and a true testament to the resilience of rodent nature. Kudos to the Xzyl mouse for always putting itself out there!

A more realistic interpretation of the Xzyl mutant mouse is that it either has a learning defect or is masochistic.