15 ms·

Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

216 points by xvmt 4y ago

onion2k 4y ago
The global population of Earth has pretty much doubled since July 1968 when the experiment was run. Evidently the fears of overpopulation they had were unfounded.
- adrianN 4y ago
  A number of important ecosystems are now much closer to collapse than they were in the seventies. I don't think that we can say that fears of overpopulation were unfounded. The evidence is quite clear that we consume a large number of resources much faster than they replenish.
- noduerme 4y ago
  Unless you consider that episodes of individual psychosis seem to have risen exponentially every decade since then..
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    There are numerous cases of individual psychosis associated with much lower population densities as well. Wisconsin Death Trip is one reasonably well-known collection of such instances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip I'd be interested in knowing what the basis of your statement is, and how you're considering reporting / observation biases. (Note that I'm actually concerned with overpopulation and various psychological / sociological impacts of same. I'm simply highlighting that psychosis and antisocial behaviour is not exclusive to this particular population pattern.)
- muzani 4y ago
  Overpopulation hits places like India and Bangladesh badly. China and Europe's population actually seems to be declining and they seem to be quite well off. If you tweak the variables just a little, things change massively, so I think the article gets it right in saying that it's dangerous to draw conclusions. Even drawing conclusions from my previous paragraph.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    >and Europe's population Where are you getting this from? Loads of countries are still rising in population, mostly due to immigration (birthrates of natives are below replacement rates). >and they seem to be quite well off. I wouldn't call Europe 'well off', unless your definition solely relies on "well, at least it is a developed country". We're facing multiple crises in several countries, and the younger generations are the ones most likely to pay the price.
    - muzani 4y ago
      A quick Google brings up this list: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fer... I might have been mistaken in saying "Europe" as a whole but European countries are at the bottom of the list. It also seems that the bottom of the list has some economically struggling families, so this correlation could be mistaken. Fertility seems to be a lagging indicator - if someone can't afford a two bedroom apartment, they're just unlikely to have 5 kids.
      - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
        Have a look at the graphs in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Netherlands and notice how the growth percentage has only just reached 0%, despite fertility rate having plunged all the way to near 1.5 since the 1970s. What's more, many still predict population growths and the government is still stimulating it through subsidizing children and giving tax breaks to immigrants. The Netherlands is on the cusp of declining, but not declining yet. If you look up the history of fertility rates, most of developed Europe plunged similarly, yet population kept growing well up to now.
        muzani 4y ago
        That's helpful. I always assumed that fertility rates linked to population growth, but forgot things like immigration.
- harha 4y ago
  I wouldn’t say they’re unfounded, humans just evolve more quickly to adapt through technology, giving access to previously inhabitable places. There’s still a lot of these left though overall quality of life would get worse in terms of living space and better in other areas like medicine.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Only in the sense that people are bad with numbers and timescales, and that the fears themselves directly led to funding for research that happened to be successful at creating affordable solutions. The fictional population of NYC in Soylent Green (released 1973, set in 2022) was 40 million, whereas the actual population today is 8.8 million, but even 40 million would give it about the population density of Manila today and wouldn’t look like it was portrayed in the film. With sufficient industrial farming effort[0] and only existing technology, we could support something like 10 trillion on Earth, but if we did that then everything that wasn’t a farm would look like the top of the Wikipedia list of highest density city districts. As for the correspondence between the rat experimental world and the human world, as the article itself says: > Given these wildly varying (even contradictory) readings, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that personal and political views, rather than objective inquiry, are driving these critics’ outlooks. And indeed, a closer look at the interpretations severely undermines them. Also, we aren’t mice, so while we are doing various — and in some cases, unhealthy — things in response to our world of high abundance and low child mortality, we are doing different things, more slowly, and with the ability to discover and respond to the big picture. [0] the material requirements are on par with paraterraforming the Moon, because the first step is “make enough greenhouses for most of the land on the planet”, but it could be done.
  - NeoTar 4y ago
    > The fictional population of NYC in Soylent Green (released 1973, set in 2022) was 40 million, whereas the actual population today is 8.8 million, but even 40 million would give it about the population density of Manila today and wouldn’t look like it was portrayed in the film. Another example is Isaac Asimov's Trantor, a world-wide city enclosed with globes which requires the resources of multiple agricultural worlds to sustain it. It has a population of 45 billion, and a surface area of approx. 40% that of Earth. Do the calculations, and the population density is, as Wikipedia says: "similar to the current population density of Germany or Connecticut. " I can't speak for Connecticut, but Germany certainly doesn't feel crowded. Even in central Berlin we have a huge amount of green space. Even Coruscant in Star Wars, with a population of 1 trillion people (1 000 000 000 000) has a population density less than New York City.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  If we were half as many as we are today, we would need half as many resources as well. You can cut a cake in however many pieces you want, but eventually there won't be much to go around.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    I'll bet there's some kind of hysteresis in that. Things are rarely as nice in a company that has just reached 50 people vs one that has come down to 50 people. Same goes for a lot of orgs.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  But the consequences of too many young males and not enough females, are quite similar. The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching: Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations. Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as well. Barely recognized, the ramifications of too many men are only starting to come into sight. “In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,” warns Li Shuzhuo, a leading demographer at Xi’an Jiaotong University.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    I remember this reporting coming out over a decade ago. We are seeing tbe consequences of this in tons of ways, be it the rise of authoritarianism and incel culture, to region-specific issues for China/India.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      Yes, the problem with comparing the study on mice to people is that mice iterate much quicker than humans. Generation time in (lab) mice is about 9-11 weeks, while in humans living in modern societies it takes between 20 and 30 years. To have actual consequences on society at large we need to wait at least two generations, so obviously in such a long period of time people won't notice the build up, like they do in the short time span it takes for mice. It happened with climate change too.
- Hammershaft 4y ago
  Hard to agree with this when faced with the overwhelming environmental degradation we see globally. Between extinctions 1000x the normal background rate, microplastics & chemicals poisining food supplies, climate change, oceanic accumulations of garbage twice the size of france and growing exponentially, growing water shortages, topsoil erosion, etc etc etc... it is not clear that those fears are unfounded.
noduerme 4y ago
The (famous) experiment seems to prove that mice are happy with the benefits of relatively high levels of social organization until the burdens of close quarter living and constant company drain them of their will to live and their ability to thrive. It amounts to a pretty strong argument for American style independence and personal liberty. The implication, I think, was that it was supposed to also endorse the laissez-faire economic system undergirding those things, even if only as a necessary evil. As a mammal who hates confined spaces, I can mostly get on board with that.
- adrianN 4y ago
  The famous experiment seems to prove that a large number young people are bad for social stability in a mice society. That amounts to a pretty strong argument against infant healthcare /s. I don't think we should generalize too much from mice to men. Deriving social policy from what works for mice seems like a very bold move to me.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    You can't generalize too much, nor can you assume humans will just "fix it for everyone" like the author seems to imply we are some enlightened, higher species. That assumption can also backfire. A highly adaptive species capable of grouping up gives leeway for some extreme solutions which will solve the problem for a subpopulation at the cost of another. Humans might solve the problem, but not in the way which is best for the entire population. Plenty of examples in both the past and the present.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > The famous experiment seems to prove that a large number young people are bad for social stability in a mice society. For what it's worth: there are strong indications suggesting a link between a large number of young, especially male, people and the emergence of social unrest [1][2][3]. [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26271410 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26271410 [2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/young-people-key-defusing-unrest/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/young-people-key-defu... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/angry-young-men-are-making-the-world-less-stable/284364/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/an...
barry-cotter 4y ago
Has this ever been replicated? Were detailed enough records kept that we be sure this happened more or less as described or is it one of the famous experiments that were at best described in a completely misleading way, like the Zimnbardo Stanford prison experiment, or wildly and willfully misinterpreted, like the murder of Kitty Genovese?
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Very good question. The Behavioural Sink Wikipedia page doesn't list any independent replications, though Calhoun studied the phenomenon from 1947--1995, a period of 52 years. I'm going to emphasize independent replication as having the same principle investigator study a question doesn't meet that bar. The failure to replicate (or of Wikipedia to note any replication which might exist) is curious given the notoriety and significance of the Rat Utopia studies.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    Surprising given that the cost to maintain such an experiment would be fairly low.
- gwern 4y ago
  As it happens, there were some (now very obscure) attempts to replicate it. They failed. I cover (and jailbreak) them in my criticism of Mouse Utopia: https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia OP is a bad writeup. He should be ashamed to write such an uncritical piece which says nothing you wouldn't find in either the Down The Rabbithole YouTube video (which seems to be patient zero for the resurrection of the Mouse Utopia myth) or the Wikipedia entry. The problem with Mouse Utopia is not that it has been interpreted in different ways by later pundits, but that it's probably bullshit to begin with. (How thoughtless do you have to be to note that it was the 25th experiment in a very long series of them before/after the behavioral sink experiment, and then not immediately wonder WTF happened in the >24 other experiments and then wonder why you can't find any information about any of them?)
- bnralt 4y ago
mlatu 4y ago
i think this shows only that social species' behaviours are fine tuned to the environment they have evolved in and drastically changing said environment requires the species to adapt in order to survive. i feel like there should be a pen size above which such an experiment might run indefinetly. but my gut tells me: no matter the size, it will always eventually crash and burn because mice can't "talk it out" i think the only possible lesson here is: if you send a generation ship to alpha centauri, you better make sure they all have at least one common language.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  I was following that until the language thing. How does talking, make more room?
  - cdot2 4y ago
    It doesn't make more room but it would help people develop a society that adjusts for the new environment.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    One half of the mice could talk among themselves and go to war with the other half, perhaps.
    - mantas 4y ago
      Ukraine and Russia is a good example… oh wait!
  - mlatu 4y ago
    when was the last time you had to fight with someone using just words and how do you think would that interaction have been if you and your counterpart had not used words but teeth, fists and fingernails instead? assuming you had the same standing to each other prior to the fight, would you two be able to interact the same afterwards, regardless who won? it doesnt make more room, but it allows for compromises
nephrite 4y ago
So it wasn't an utopia. The mice had enough water and food, but they ran out of living space. It's so obvious I can't understand nobody pointed it out yet.
- cdot2 4y ago
  I think the point is that the population would continue to grow until they run out of living space and go extinct regardless of the exact size of the experiment.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- dredmorbius 4y ago
  There's the ever-so-remote possibility that this was precisely the point: But the thing is, this wasn’t Calhoun’s first rodent utopia. This was the 25th iteration. And by this point he knew how quickly mouse heaven could deteriorate into mouse hell. From TFA.
  - jquery 4y ago
    Feels like after the 3rd iteration you could call Calhoun a sadist.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  there's never gonna be "enough space" for animals that do not understand the concept of overcrowding and planned parenthood. That's the point of the experiment: in a food rich environment with no predators and no diseases, without human intervention (or intelligent planning if you prefer) everything is gonna deteriorate to the point of no return. Nature is all about balance and we humans do nothing to follow that predicament, so if we are not careful and let things go by themselves, we risk of giving birth to hell on Earth. Take the Yellowstone example. Yellowstone is not a small and confined space and yet when wolves disappeared, herbivores, moose in particular, started growing in number exponentially, posing a threat to the ecosystem because, with no predators around, young moose could freely walk all over the park and started eating too-young trees, basically preventing them from growing. Then wolves were re-introduced, and even though it's still unclear if the damages caused by moose can be undone, they at least stopped things from getting worse, cause wolves mainly prey on moose. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/yellowstone-wolves-reintroduction-helped-stabilize-ecosystem https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/yellowsto...
dalbasal 4y ago
One of those topics where the meta is richer than the actual science. I remember my Dad mentioning as a child. The public interest is interesting in itself. Not the the science isn't interesting. Population/behavioural studies like this are quite interesting. Animal behaviour is interesting, especially group behaviours where dynamics can play out. That said, what was he actually trying to learn? If you take the same colony, and manually removed a few hundred juveniles every week... that's basically a mouse farm. So, we know from both logic and evidence that "overpopulation" is a thing that occurs. Organisms multiply at exponential rates, and there must be hard limits on growth somewhere. Meanwhile, rodents as especially known for boom/bust cycles. Is it surprising that behaviour gets weird during "peak mouse" events? Mice aren't cannibalistic. The colony was protected from disease. Food didn't run out. Eventually, it's so crowded and everyone is stepping on one another. Breeding becomes unsuccessful, and that's the limiting factor. What's the alternative, that the cube becomes literally full of mice before crashing? That mouse society adopts a super slow breeding rate to stabilize populations. What happened was, ultimately, a compromise between these two. In any case, if the goal is analogy to humans... where's the work. If it's a scientific endeavour, how do we get from insights about mice to insights about people?
- NineStarPoint 4y ago
  It’s interesting to me at least that the group’s population crashed completely to zero and not to just a low number that then began climbing again. This is undoubtably a consequence of mice not being able to escape from the chaos due to the small size of the territory, but I do wonder what the minimum viable size would be to allow for a full boom-bust-boom cycle to occur.
  - Someone 4y ago
    But there wouldn’t be chaos anymore by the time population dropped to a few hundred. Between the two moments of equal population something must have changed in the population, either genetically or, IMO more likely, culturally.
  - dalbasal 4y ago
    I don't think it's that surprising, especially as an occasional result. Consider that surviving severe overpopulation is trauma. Survivors are physically and/or psychologically sick. They're not good breeders and at this point. Happens frequently in aquariums. Guppies breed like guppies. Overpopulate, then die back. The proximate causes can be varied. Maybe there's an ammonia spike, oxygen deficiency or other consequence of overabundance. When the "crash" happens, survivors tend to be a precocious bunch. They're past breeding prime, and probably injured by the events of the crash and its precedents. Starting a colony with "poor stock" is always more difficult, and that's what you now have. It doesn't have to be overpopulation that causes a crash. Say you accidentally pollute the water with soapy hands. Some fish will die today. Some tomorrow. Dead fish rotting is also polluting. Fish surviving the ordeal will probably have reduced lifespans and breeding potential. My unqualified guess is that most extirpation events leave survivors, usually in less than ideal shape. The technical extirpation happens later, as survivors gradually drop off without successful reproduction. Good question about minimum population size for boom/bust cycles to occur. I suspect this is more about environmental richness than pure numbers. Some predation probably stabilizes things, and some boom/bust might be possible. If you had multiple colonies connected by 500m of tubing, this "distance" between territories might allow for "local" booms and busts to occur.
nickdothutton 4y ago
If I was to start a social network I’d call it Universe 25. Maybe shorten to u25.
rsynnott 4y ago
> In earlier utopias involving rats Well, there's a phrase you don't see much. This does feel like a kind of retro quasi-Malthusian concern these days, though. In practice, populations tend to stabilize as the economy develops, and the earth is now expected to hit peak population within decades.
- swayvil 4y ago
  We can shift "peak population" forward by instituting progressively dystopian measures. "The city" is one such measure. We can also sacrifice quality of food, air... And imagine how many we could pack in if everybody stayed at home and played on their computer.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    But I mean, the point is, we're _not_ shifting it forward. It is moving backwards (and smaller; most estimates are now for a peak of about 10bn, vs far more extravagant estimates in the past), closer to the present than would generally have been expected a few decades ago. In the 50s, many people didn't think there'd be a natural peak population at all; they were going with full Malthusianism. In practice, population growth tends to slow down and eventually reverse more or less naturally in advanced industrial economies.
h2odragon 4y ago
One of the worst jobs i ever had, occasionally required us to drown some mice. Excess population / euthanized "feeders" for pet snakes. The method was to put several mice into a small wire cage, and then submerge the cage in water. Usually I filled a bucket with hot water, beforehand, and made this operation fast as possible. Dunk and done. One day I came across a cow orker attempting to do this job (I had been busy and it was usually my task); they'd put the cage in the sink and were gradually filling the basin with cold water, mice swimming and grasping each other and etc. Panic and horror. Nasty. Somehow, one mother mouse wound up on top of the pile, holding one almost weaned baby. As the water passed her knees she stood up and held the baby over her head. Prepared to die and use every moment left keeping the kid alive. I had to adopt her and her baby after seeing that. They were never exceptional as pet mice but I still feel good about saving those two.
- shlant 4y ago
  what a rollercoaster of a story. Thank you for sharing.
- michaelgrafl 4y ago
  Fucking hell did I just read? I've just read Flowers for Algernon again a few weeks ago. Don't pull my heart strings like that.
- jklinger410 4y ago
  I'm not vegan but I think about it all the time.
  - Alop3x 4y ago
  - badRNG 4y ago
    Same boat. I'm not a vegan, and I try my absolute best to avoid thinking about what we put animals through. It certainly sits in a specific category of intrusive thoughts. The only real analog to this in my mind is being aware of my own mortality; I just avoid that thought and shove it out of my mind. Occasionally my comparatively relaxed life is harshly interrupted by an awareness of these facts and I'm ripped back to these realities for just a short, terrifying moment. Graciously, a distraction is always readily available.
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swayvil 4y ago
Who are our "beautiful ones" I wonder. The asexual compulsive groomers. Grooming could be the mouse equivalent of entertainment. Movies and videogames and such.
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  Hikikomori: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
- kipchak 4y ago
  NEET is the term I see most commonly with some variation.
mhb 4y ago
Mouse armor: https://www.boredpanda.com/cat-mice-armor-jeff-de-boer https://www.boredpanda.com/cat-mice-armor-jeff-de-boer
rossdavidh 4y ago
It would seem like the more obvious lesson would be, "when in conditions very different from what that species evolved for, new and often serious problems will arise". Which is, no doubt, true and even relevant. But, since we evolved for conditions very different than rats did, I'm not sure how much more can be concluded. It does point out, though, the importance of being skeptical of any other scientific study done in rats, that hasn't been replicated with several other mammalian species. Or at least, skeptical of applying the "lessons learned" to humans.
- tonmoy 4y ago
  What was surprising is that the mice didn’t end up evolving some traits and instincts optimized for the new conditions. I would’ve thought they would learn new behavior after a few generations to thrive in the new environment. This makes me think that a post scarcity environment may not be enough to ensure the survival of a species
  - kibwen 4y ago
    This is the fallacy of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger". Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, adversity reduces strength rather than increasing it, especially if it happens too frequently and too severely. Evolution/adaptation works over long periods of gradual change, which is why the effort needed to survive, say, a global climate apocalypse varies widely based on whether the same amount of warming happens over 10 years, or 100 years, or 1000 years.
  - rossdavidh 4y ago
    Not sure, but it occurs to me that some lab animals have reduced genetic diversity compared to wild types of the same species. Sometimes this is by design, to reduce variation, sometimes just because the way the lab animals are bred happens to make a few of them the ancestors of the general population (especially if you're buying all your lab mice from the same place). So, they might have had a better chance of evolving behavior more optimized to the situation, if they had more genetic diversity to work with. Just an hypothesis.
bannedbybros 4y ago
raldi 4y ago
Real Mouse Heaven would've included a big Burning Man camp to work on so they'd have something to do all year.
sam36 4y ago
Funny, people had been posting the "John Calhoun rodent experiment" meme on 4chan for the last year or so. Guess someone took notice.
osigurdson 4y ago
>> a 4½-foot cube—with everything a mouse could ever desire They likely desired a larger cube.
- oh-4-fucks-sake 4y ago
  One step further: they needed a larger cube. Seems like the study reasoned that providing unlimited food/water ruled out "resource scarcity" as a cause for decline. Space is very much a resource. It's no different than the naïve reasoning around government-run housing projects: "You have food, water, and a tiny space to live crammed among 1000s of other people--what more could you need"? Didn't this spawn aberrant, violent, unhealthy behavior too? Wasn't (at least in theory) part of the solution to stop doing ultra-ultra-high-density housing? (Given, it's not like the government executed on re-housing all the project-tenants into lower-density housing--they often simply dumped them back into the streets.) TL;DR: It's mostly obvious why ultra-high-density projects (and prisons, and concentration camps, and slums) set people up for failure; 256 tiny nests in a 4.5ft cube sounds a whole like a housing project.
- generalizations 4y ago
  There were only 8 mice in that cube when the experiment started. Seems like that would be more than enough space for them. That the mice overfilled their living space through reproduction is not a limitation of the experiment, but an outcome.
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    A fairly obvious outcome with exponential growth - eventually there would be too many mice and bad things would happen. The fact the the population eventually went to zero is somewhat interesting but it would be necessary to run the experiment many times to draw any conclusions on that point. Overall the knowledge gained was not nearly worth the suffering that the mice endured.
thehappypm 4y ago
Take a species that’s got a high reproductive rate due to high infant mortality Jam them into a small enclosure that dramatically changes the infant mortality rate Watch with glee as overpopulation makes the ecosystem a toxic hell Great science /s
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toiletfuneral 4y ago
yellowapple 4y ago
> (Incidentally, after Universe 25’s collapse, Calhoun began building new utopias to encourage creative behavior by keeping mice physically and mentally nourished. This research, in turn, inspired a children’s book named after Calhoun’s workplace—Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, wherein a group of rats escape from a colony designed to stimulate their intelligence.) One of my favorite books growing up - and indeed among the very few I read voluntarily.
chaostheory 4y ago
Contrary to what most written accounts say about Calhoun’s most famous experiment, he did not provide his mice with unlimited resources. The provided plenty of everything except for physical space. This article does a better job covering that angle where other articles barely mention the issue or describe the problems that stem from it.
goatcode 4y ago
Ever since learning of the Mouse Utopia (where did "mouse 'heaven'" come from?) experiment, I found it interesting that its results spoke more directly of LOCALIZED overpopulation. In a human context: cities. Many of the pathologies observed in the experiment are very starkly displayed in human cities. I've always found it odd that those most interested with overpopulation concerns also advocate for cities as part of a way to solve the issue, when they really only exacerbate the problem.
- zwkrt 4y ago
  I guess its thinking of overpopulation as a phenomenological effect on the individual vs the global effect of all of us on the environment. Interesting point though, I had never thought of it in that way before. People all over the world are already living in Blade Runner levels of density.
  - goatcode 4y ago
    >living in Blade Runner levels of density It's interesting both that they do that and that we've been so conditioned to think that it's somehow a necessity. I once watched a breakdown of population and housing, and the author of the piece calculated that everyone currently living on earth could live in a one-story comfortable family house, with a yard and space for community parks and gardens, and the entire population of the planet would fit inside of Texas, with some tens of thousands of acres left over in the state. It blew my mind, and made me really ponder the nature of why we live the way we do in some cases.
tharne 4y ago
I don't have any firm conclusions on the meaning to be gleaned from Universe 25, but man, that article may have been the most interesting thing I've read in a while.
BMc2020 4y ago
I knew it would be this experiment. I was just commenting (in a different thread) on how decent people underestimate how evil evil can get a few minutes ago too.

216 points by xvmt 4y ago

The global population of Earth has pretty much doubled since July 1968 when the experiment was run. Evidently the fears of overpopulation they had were unfounded.

adrianN 4y ago
A number of important ecosystems are now much closer to collapse than they were in the seventies. I don't think that we can say that fears of overpopulation were unfounded. The evidence is quite clear that we consume a large number of resources much faster than they replenish.
noduerme 4y ago
Unless you consider that episodes of individual psychosis seem to have risen exponentially every decade since then..
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  There are numerous cases of individual psychosis associated with much lower population densities as well. Wisconsin Death Trip is one reasonably well-known collection of such instances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip I'd be interested in knowing what the basis of your statement is, and how you're considering reporting / observation biases. (Note that I'm actually concerned with overpopulation and various psychological / sociological impacts of same. I'm simply highlighting that psychosis and antisocial behaviour is not exclusive to this particular population pattern.)
muzani 4y ago
Overpopulation hits places like India and Bangladesh badly. China and Europe's population actually seems to be declining and they seem to be quite well off. If you tweak the variables just a little, things change massively, so I think the article gets it right in saying that it's dangerous to draw conclusions. Even drawing conclusions from my previous paragraph.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  >and Europe's population Where are you getting this from? Loads of countries are still rising in population, mostly due to immigration (birthrates of natives are below replacement rates). >and they seem to be quite well off. I wouldn't call Europe 'well off', unless your definition solely relies on "well, at least it is a developed country". We're facing multiple crises in several countries, and the younger generations are the ones most likely to pay the price.
  - muzani 4y ago
    A quick Google brings up this list: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fer... I might have been mistaken in saying "Europe" as a whole but European countries are at the bottom of the list. It also seems that the bottom of the list has some economically struggling families, so this correlation could be mistaken. Fertility seems to be a lagging indicator - if someone can't afford a two bedroom apartment, they're just unlikely to have 5 kids.
    - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
      Have a look at the graphs in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Netherlands and notice how the growth percentage has only just reached 0%, despite fertility rate having plunged all the way to near 1.5 since the 1970s. What's more, many still predict population growths and the government is still stimulating it through subsidizing children and giving tax breaks to immigrants. The Netherlands is on the cusp of declining, but not declining yet. If you look up the history of fertility rates, most of developed Europe plunged similarly, yet population kept growing well up to now.
      - muzani 4y ago
        That's helpful. I always assumed that fertility rates linked to population growth, but forgot things like immigration.
harha 4y ago
I wouldn’t say they’re unfounded, humans just evolve more quickly to adapt through technology, giving access to previously inhabitable places. There’s still a lot of these left though overall quality of life would get worse in terms of living space and better in other areas like medicine.
ben_w 4y ago
Only in the sense that people are bad with numbers and timescales, and that the fears themselves directly led to funding for research that happened to be successful at creating affordable solutions. The fictional population of NYC in Soylent Green (released 1973, set in 2022) was 40 million, whereas the actual population today is 8.8 million, but even 40 million would give it about the population density of Manila today and wouldn’t look like it was portrayed in the film. With sufficient industrial farming effort[0] and only existing technology, we could support something like 10 trillion on Earth, but if we did that then everything that wasn’t a farm would look like the top of the Wikipedia list of highest density city districts. As for the correspondence between the rat experimental world and the human world, as the article itself says: > Given these wildly varying (even contradictory) readings, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that personal and political views, rather than objective inquiry, are driving these critics’ outlooks. And indeed, a closer look at the interpretations severely undermines them. Also, we aren’t mice, so while we are doing various — and in some cases, unhealthy — things in response to our world of high abundance and low child mortality, we are doing different things, more slowly, and with the ability to discover and respond to the big picture. [0] the material requirements are on par with paraterraforming the Moon, because the first step is “make enough greenhouses for most of the land on the planet”, but it could be done.
- NeoTar 4y ago
  > The fictional population of NYC in Soylent Green (released 1973, set in 2022) was 40 million, whereas the actual population today is 8.8 million, but even 40 million would give it about the population density of Manila today and wouldn’t look like it was portrayed in the film. Another example is Isaac Asimov's Trantor, a world-wide city enclosed with globes which requires the resources of multiple agricultural worlds to sustain it. It has a population of 45 billion, and a surface area of approx. 40% that of Earth. Do the calculations, and the population density is, as Wikipedia says: "similar to the current population density of Germany or Connecticut. " I can't speak for Connecticut, but Germany certainly doesn't feel crowded. Even in central Berlin we have a huge amount of green space. Even Coruscant in Star Wars, with a population of 1 trillion people (1 000 000 000 000) has a population density less than New York City.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
If we were half as many as we are today, we would need half as many resources as well. You can cut a cake in however many pieces you want, but eventually there won't be much to go around.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  I'll bet there's some kind of hysteresis in that. Things are rarely as nice in a company that has just reached 50 people vs one that has come down to 50 people. Same goes for a lot of orgs.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
But the consequences of too many young males and not enough females, are quite similar. The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching: Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations. Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as well. Barely recognized, the ramifications of too many men are only starting to come into sight. “In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,” warns Li Shuzhuo, a leading demographer at Xi’an Jiaotong University.
- tomrod 4y ago
  I remember this reporting coming out over a decade ago. We are seeing tbe consequences of this in tons of ways, be it the rise of authoritarianism and incel culture, to region-specific issues for China/India.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    Yes, the problem with comparing the study on mice to people is that mice iterate much quicker than humans. Generation time in (lab) mice is about 9-11 weeks, while in humans living in modern societies it takes between 20 and 30 years. To have actual consequences on society at large we need to wait at least two generations, so obviously in such a long period of time people won't notice the build up, like they do in the short time span it takes for mice. It happened with climate change too.
Hammershaft 4y ago
Hard to agree with this when faced with the overwhelming environmental degradation we see globally. Between extinctions 1000x the normal background rate, microplastics & chemicals poisining food supplies, climate change, oceanic accumulations of garbage twice the size of france and growing exponentially, growing water shortages, topsoil erosion, etc etc etc... it is not clear that those fears are unfounded.

noduerme 4y ago

The (famous) experiment seems to prove that mice are happy with the benefits of relatively high levels of social organization until the burdens of close quarter living and constant company drain them of their will to live and their ability to thrive. It amounts to a pretty strong argument for American style independence and personal liberty. The implication, I think, was that it was supposed to also endorse the laissez-faire economic system undergirding those things, even if only as a necessary evil. As a mammal who hates confined spaces, I can mostly get on board with that.

adrianN 4y ago
The famous experiment seems to prove that a large number young people are bad for social stability in a mice society. That amounts to a pretty strong argument against infant healthcare /s. I don't think we should generalize too much from mice to men. Deriving social policy from what works for mice seems like a very bold move to me.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  You can't generalize too much, nor can you assume humans will just "fix it for everyone" like the author seems to imply we are some enlightened, higher species. That assumption can also backfire. A highly adaptive species capable of grouping up gives leeway for some extreme solutions which will solve the problem for a subpopulation at the cost of another. Humans might solve the problem, but not in the way which is best for the entire population. Plenty of examples in both the past and the present.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > The famous experiment seems to prove that a large number young people are bad for social stability in a mice society. For what it's worth: there are strong indications suggesting a link between a large number of young, especially male, people and the emergence of social unrest [1][2][3]. [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26271410 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26271410 [2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/young-people-key-defusing-unrest/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/young-people-key-defu... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/angry-young-men-are-making-the-world-less-stable/284364/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/an...

barry-cotter 4y ago

Has this ever been replicated? Were detailed enough records kept that we be sure this happened more or less as described or is it one of the famous experiments that were at best described in a completely misleading way, like the Zimnbardo Stanford prison experiment, or wildly and willfully misinterpreted, like the murder of Kitty Genovese?

dredmorbius 4y ago
Very good question. The Behavioural Sink Wikipedia page doesn't list any independent replications, though Calhoun studied the phenomenon from 1947--1995, a period of 52 years. I'm going to emphasize independent replication as having the same principle investigator study a question doesn't meet that bar. The failure to replicate (or of Wikipedia to note any replication which might exist) is curious given the notoriety and significance of the Rat Utopia studies.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Surprising given that the cost to maintain such an experiment would be fairly low.
gwern 4y ago
As it happens, there were some (now very obscure) attempts to replicate it. They failed. I cover (and jailbreak) them in my criticism of Mouse Utopia: https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia OP is a bad writeup. He should be ashamed to write such an uncritical piece which says nothing you wouldn't find in either the Down The Rabbithole YouTube video (which seems to be patient zero for the resurrection of the Mouse Utopia myth) or the Wikipedia entry. The problem with Mouse Utopia is not that it has been interpreted in different ways by later pundits, but that it's probably bullshit to begin with. (How thoughtless do you have to be to note that it was the 25th experiment in a very long series of them before/after the behavioral sink experiment, and then not immediately wonder WTF happened in the >24 other experiments and then wonder why you can't find any information about any of them?)
bnralt 4y ago

mlatu 4y ago

i think this shows only that social species' behaviours are fine tuned to the environment they have evolved in and drastically changing said environment requires the species to adapt in order to survive. i feel like there should be a pen size above which such an experiment might run indefinetly. but my gut tells me: no matter the size, it will always eventually crash and burn because mice can't "talk it out" i think the only possible lesson here is: if you send a generation ship to alpha centauri, you better make sure they all have at least one common language.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
I was following that until the language thing. How does talking, make more room?
- cdot2 4y ago
  It doesn't make more room but it would help people develop a society that adjusts for the new environment.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  One half of the mice could talk among themselves and go to war with the other half, perhaps.
  - mantas 4y ago
    Ukraine and Russia is a good example… oh wait!
- mlatu 4y ago
  when was the last time you had to fight with someone using just words and how do you think would that interaction have been if you and your counterpart had not used words but teeth, fists and fingernails instead? assuming you had the same standing to each other prior to the fight, would you two be able to interact the same afterwards, regardless who won? it doesnt make more room, but it allows for compromises

nephrite 4y ago

So it wasn't an utopia. The mice had enough water and food, but they ran out of living space. It's so obvious I can't understand nobody pointed it out yet.

cdot2 4y ago
I think the point is that the population would continue to grow until they run out of living space and go extinct regardless of the exact size of the experiment.
- deleted 4y ago
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dredmorbius 4y ago
There's the ever-so-remote possibility that this was precisely the point: But the thing is, this wasn’t Calhoun’s first rodent utopia. This was the 25th iteration. And by this point he knew how quickly mouse heaven could deteriorate into mouse hell. From TFA.
- jquery 4y ago
  Feels like after the 3rd iteration you could call Calhoun a sadist.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
there's never gonna be "enough space" for animals that do not understand the concept of overcrowding and planned parenthood. That's the point of the experiment: in a food rich environment with no predators and no diseases, without human intervention (or intelligent planning if you prefer) everything is gonna deteriorate to the point of no return. Nature is all about balance and we humans do nothing to follow that predicament, so if we are not careful and let things go by themselves, we risk of giving birth to hell on Earth. Take the Yellowstone example. Yellowstone is not a small and confined space and yet when wolves disappeared, herbivores, moose in particular, started growing in number exponentially, posing a threat to the ecosystem because, with no predators around, young moose could freely walk all over the park and started eating too-young trees, basically preventing them from growing. Then wolves were re-introduced, and even though it's still unclear if the damages caused by moose can be undone, they at least stopped things from getting worse, cause wolves mainly prey on moose. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/yellowstone-wolves-reintroduction-helped-stabilize-ecosystem https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/yellowsto...

dalbasal 4y ago

One of those topics where the meta is richer than the actual science. I remember my Dad mentioning as a child. The public interest is interesting in itself. Not the the science isn't interesting. Population/behavioural studies like this are quite interesting. Animal behaviour is interesting, especially group behaviours where dynamics can play out. That said, what was he actually trying to learn? If you take the same colony, and manually removed a few hundred juveniles every week... that's basically a mouse farm. So, we know from both logic and evidence that "overpopulation" is a thing that occurs. Organisms multiply at exponential rates, and there must be hard limits on growth somewhere. Meanwhile, rodents as especially known for boom/bust cycles. Is it surprising that behaviour gets weird during "peak mouse" events? Mice aren't cannibalistic. The colony was protected from disease. Food didn't run out. Eventually, it's so crowded and everyone is stepping on one another. Breeding becomes unsuccessful, and that's the limiting factor. What's the alternative, that the cube becomes literally full of mice before crashing? That mouse society adopts a super slow breeding rate to stabilize populations. What happened was, ultimately, a compromise between these two. In any case, if the goal is analogy to humans... where's the work. If it's a scientific endeavour, how do we get from insights about mice to insights about people?

NineStarPoint 4y ago
It’s interesting to me at least that the group’s population crashed completely to zero and not to just a low number that then began climbing again. This is undoubtably a consequence of mice not being able to escape from the chaos due to the small size of the territory, but I do wonder what the minimum viable size would be to allow for a full boom-bust-boom cycle to occur.
- Someone 4y ago
  But there wouldn’t be chaos anymore by the time population dropped to a few hundred. Between the two moments of equal population something must have changed in the population, either genetically or, IMO more likely, culturally.
- dalbasal 4y ago
  I don't think it's that surprising, especially as an occasional result. Consider that surviving severe overpopulation is trauma. Survivors are physically and/or psychologically sick. They're not good breeders and at this point. Happens frequently in aquariums. Guppies breed like guppies. Overpopulate, then die back. The proximate causes can be varied. Maybe there's an ammonia spike, oxygen deficiency or other consequence of overabundance. When the "crash" happens, survivors tend to be a precocious bunch. They're past breeding prime, and probably injured by the events of the crash and its precedents. Starting a colony with "poor stock" is always more difficult, and that's what you now have. It doesn't have to be overpopulation that causes a crash. Say you accidentally pollute the water with soapy hands. Some fish will die today. Some tomorrow. Dead fish rotting is also polluting. Fish surviving the ordeal will probably have reduced lifespans and breeding potential. My unqualified guess is that most extirpation events leave survivors, usually in less than ideal shape. The technical extirpation happens later, as survivors gradually drop off without successful reproduction. Good question about minimum population size for boom/bust cycles to occur. I suspect this is more about environmental richness than pure numbers. Some predation probably stabilizes things, and some boom/bust might be possible. If you had multiple colonies connected by 500m of tubing, this "distance" between territories might allow for "local" booms and busts to occur.

nickdothutton 4y ago

If I was to start a social network I’d call it Universe 25. Maybe shorten to u25.

rsynnott 4y ago

> In earlier utopias involving rats Well, there's a phrase you don't see much. This does feel like a kind of retro quasi-Malthusian concern these days, though. In practice, populations tend to stabilize as the economy develops, and the earth is now expected to hit peak population within decades.

swayvil 4y ago
We can shift "peak population" forward by instituting progressively dystopian measures. "The city" is one such measure. We can also sacrifice quality of food, air... And imagine how many we could pack in if everybody stayed at home and played on their computer.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  But I mean, the point is, we're _not_ shifting it forward. It is moving backwards (and smaller; most estimates are now for a peak of about 10bn, vs far more extravagant estimates in the past), closer to the present than would generally have been expected a few decades ago. In the 50s, many people didn't think there'd be a natural peak population at all; they were going with full Malthusianism. In practice, population growth tends to slow down and eventually reverse more or less naturally in advanced industrial economies.

h2odragon 4y ago

One of the worst jobs i ever had, occasionally required us to drown some mice. Excess population / euthanized "feeders" for pet snakes. The method was to put several mice into a small wire cage, and then submerge the cage in water. Usually I filled a bucket with hot water, beforehand, and made this operation fast as possible. Dunk and done. One day I came across a cow orker attempting to do this job (I had been busy and it was usually my task); they'd put the cage in the sink and were gradually filling the basin with cold water, mice swimming and grasping each other and etc. Panic and horror. Nasty. Somehow, one mother mouse wound up on top of the pile, holding one almost weaned baby. As the water passed her knees she stood up and held the baby over her head. Prepared to die and use every moment left keeping the kid alive. I had to adopt her and her baby after seeing that. They were never exceptional as pet mice but I still feel good about saving those two.

shlant 4y ago
what a rollercoaster of a story. Thank you for sharing.
michaelgrafl 4y ago
Fucking hell did I just read? I've just read Flowers for Algernon again a few weeks ago. Don't pull my heart strings like that.
jklinger410 4y ago
I'm not vegan but I think about it all the time.
- Alop3x 4y ago
- badRNG 4y ago
  Same boat. I'm not a vegan, and I try my absolute best to avoid thinking about what we put animals through. It certainly sits in a specific category of intrusive thoughts. The only real analog to this in my mind is being aware of my own mortality; I just avoid that thought and shove it out of my mind. Occasionally my comparatively relaxed life is harshly interrupted by an awareness of these facts and I'm ripped back to these realities for just a short, terrifying moment. Graciously, a distraction is always readily available.

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swayvil 4y ago

Who are our "beautiful ones" I wonder. The asexual compulsive groomers. Grooming could be the mouse equivalent of entertainment. Movies and videogames and such.

NoGravitas 4y ago
Hikikomori: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
kipchak 4y ago
NEET is the term I see most commonly with some variation.

mhb 4y ago

Mouse armor: https://www.boredpanda.com/cat-mice-armor-jeff-de-boer https://www.boredpanda.com/cat-mice-armor-jeff-de-boer

rossdavidh 4y ago

It would seem like the more obvious lesson would be, "when in conditions very different from what that species evolved for, new and often serious problems will arise". Which is, no doubt, true and even relevant. But, since we evolved for conditions very different than rats did, I'm not sure how much more can be concluded. It does point out, though, the importance of being skeptical of any other scientific study done in rats, that hasn't been replicated with several other mammalian species. Or at least, skeptical of applying the "lessons learned" to humans.

tonmoy 4y ago
What was surprising is that the mice didn’t end up evolving some traits and instincts optimized for the new conditions. I would’ve thought they would learn new behavior after a few generations to thrive in the new environment. This makes me think that a post scarcity environment may not be enough to ensure the survival of a species
- kibwen 4y ago
  This is the fallacy of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger". Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, adversity reduces strength rather than increasing it, especially if it happens too frequently and too severely. Evolution/adaptation works over long periods of gradual change, which is why the effort needed to survive, say, a global climate apocalypse varies widely based on whether the same amount of warming happens over 10 years, or 100 years, or 1000 years.
- rossdavidh 4y ago
  Not sure, but it occurs to me that some lab animals have reduced genetic diversity compared to wild types of the same species. Sometimes this is by design, to reduce variation, sometimes just because the way the lab animals are bred happens to make a few of them the ancestors of the general population (especially if you're buying all your lab mice from the same place). So, they might have had a better chance of evolving behavior more optimized to the situation, if they had more genetic diversity to work with. Just an hypothesis.

bannedbybros 4y ago

raldi 4y ago

Real Mouse Heaven would've included a big Burning Man camp to work on so they'd have something to do all year.

sam36 4y ago

Funny, people had been posting the "John Calhoun rodent experiment" meme on 4chan for the last year or so. Guess someone took notice.

osigurdson 4y ago

>> a 4½-foot cube—with everything a mouse could ever desire They likely desired a larger cube.

oh-4-fucks-sake 4y ago
One step further: they needed a larger cube. Seems like the study reasoned that providing unlimited food/water ruled out "resource scarcity" as a cause for decline. Space is very much a resource. It's no different than the naïve reasoning around government-run housing projects: "You have food, water, and a tiny space to live crammed among 1000s of other people--what more could you need"? Didn't this spawn aberrant, violent, unhealthy behavior too? Wasn't (at least in theory) part of the solution to stop doing ultra-ultra-high-density housing? (Given, it's not like the government executed on re-housing all the project-tenants into lower-density housing--they often simply dumped them back into the streets.) TL;DR: It's mostly obvious why ultra-high-density projects (and prisons, and concentration camps, and slums) set people up for failure; 256 tiny nests in a 4.5ft cube sounds a whole like a housing project.
generalizations 4y ago
There were only 8 mice in that cube when the experiment started. Seems like that would be more than enough space for them. That the mice overfilled their living space through reproduction is not a limitation of the experiment, but an outcome.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  A fairly obvious outcome with exponential growth - eventually there would be too many mice and bad things would happen. The fact the the population eventually went to zero is somewhat interesting but it would be necessary to run the experiment many times to draw any conclusions on that point. Overall the knowledge gained was not nearly worth the suffering that the mice endured.

thehappypm 4y ago

Take a species that’s got a high reproductive rate due to high infant mortality Jam them into a small enclosure that dramatically changes the infant mortality rate Watch with glee as overpopulation makes the ecosystem a toxic hell Great science /s

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toiletfuneral 4y ago

yellowapple 4y ago

> (Incidentally, after Universe 25’s collapse, Calhoun began building new utopias to encourage creative behavior by keeping mice physically and mentally nourished. This research, in turn, inspired a children’s book named after Calhoun’s workplace—Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, wherein a group of rats escape from a colony designed to stimulate their intelligence.) One of my favorite books growing up - and indeed among the very few I read voluntarily.

chaostheory 4y ago

Contrary to what most written accounts say about Calhoun’s most famous experiment, he did not provide his mice with unlimited resources. The provided plenty of everything except for physical space. This article does a better job covering that angle where other articles barely mention the issue or describe the problems that stem from it.

goatcode 4y ago

Ever since learning of the Mouse Utopia (where did "mouse 'heaven'" come from?) experiment, I found it interesting that its results spoke more directly of LOCALIZED overpopulation. In a human context: cities. Many of the pathologies observed in the experiment are very starkly displayed in human cities. I've always found it odd that those most interested with overpopulation concerns also advocate for cities as part of a way to solve the issue, when they really only exacerbate the problem.

zwkrt 4y ago
I guess its thinking of overpopulation as a phenomenological effect on the individual vs the global effect of all of us on the environment. Interesting point though, I had never thought of it in that way before. People all over the world are already living in Blade Runner levels of density.
- goatcode 4y ago
  >living in Blade Runner levels of density It's interesting both that they do that and that we've been so conditioned to think that it's somehow a necessity. I once watched a breakdown of population and housing, and the author of the piece calculated that everyone currently living on earth could live in a one-story comfortable family house, with a yard and space for community parks and gardens, and the entire population of the planet would fit inside of Texas, with some tens of thousands of acres left over in the state. It blew my mind, and made me really ponder the nature of why we live the way we do in some cases.

tharne 4y ago

I don't have any firm conclusions on the meaning to be gleaned from Universe 25, but man, that article may have been the most interesting thing I've read in a while.

BMc2020 4y ago

I knew it would be this experiment. I was just commenting (in a different thread) on how decent people underestimate how evil evil can get a few minutes ago too.