Ran into some interesting food for thought

[Groesbeck Hurricane]

Yesterday I was listening to Al Kresta (2019 Countdown #4) and his interview of Mary Eberstadt the author of Primal Screams. Very riveting piece with interesting view on how our society became so polarized. She has some interesting observations related to the sexual revolution and the fall of the central family unit. My own studies in sociology pointed to the initiation of our current spiral to the horrors done by man to fellow man during the wars of '14 and '39. People wished to create a utopia where everyone was taken care of and we could all get along. This to avoid the horrors of what man is capable of committing when left unchecked.

Ms. Eberstadt is relating the fall of the family unit to a distopic feeling in society where we are approaching another collapse of civilization. This got me talking with the Wife yesterday and discussing our opinions.

This morning she sends me something which popped up for her about the basis for the Secret of N.I.H.M. I do not remember ever hearing about Dr. Calhoun however his studies as quickly laid out in the article are amazing. The end result of his efforts is frightening to me. In a quick, albeit sophomoric, perusal of his work I can see signs of our global societal woes.

Now to research more on his actions to avoid the complete failure of his universes and what actions were successful.


I do not know if this can remain a-political and out of the morass of the other off-topic thread but I do hope we can remain civil, analytical, and a-political. In other words, not be the mice in Universe 25.

[Groesbeck Hurricane]

The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the ‘Rats of NIMH’
Dr. John Bumpass Calhoun spent the ’60s and ’70s playing god to thousands of rodents.
Atlas Obscura |

Cara Giaimo



On July 9th, 1968, eight white mice were placed into a strange box at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Maybe “box” isn’t the right word for it; the space was more like a room, known as Universe 25, about the size of a small storage unit. The mice themselves were bright and healthy, hand-picked from the institute’s breeding stock. They were given the run of the place, which had everything they might need: food, water, climate control, hundreds of nesting boxes to choose from, and a lush floor of shredded paper and ground corn cob.

This is a far cry from a wild mouse’s life—no cats, no traps, no long winters. It’s even better than your average lab mouse’s, which is constantly interrupted by white-coated humans with scalpels or syringes. The residents of Universe 25 were mostly left alone, save for one man who would peer at them from above, and his team of similarly interested assistants. They must have thought they were the luckiest mice in the world. They couldn’t have known the truth: that within a few years, they and their descendants would all be dead.

The man who played mouse-God and came up with this doomed universe was named John Bumpass Calhoun. As Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams detail in a paper, “Escaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence,” Calhoun spent his childhood traipsing around Tennessee, chasing toads, collecting turtles, and banding birds. These adventures eventually led him to a doctorate in biology, and then a job in Baltimore, where he was tasked with studying the habits of Norway rats, one of the city’s chief pests.

In 1947, to keep a close eye on his charges, Calhoun constructed a quarter-acre “rat city” behind his house, and filled it with breeding pairs. He expected to be able to house 5,000 rats there, but over the two years he observed the city, the population never exceeded 150. At that point, the rats became too stressed to reproduce. They started acting weirdly, rolling dirt into balls rather than digging normal tunnels. They hissed and fought.

This fascinated Calhoun—if the rats had everything they needed, what was keeping them from overrunning his little city, just as they had all of Baltimore?

Intrigued, Calhoun built another, slightly bigger rat metropolis—this time in a barn, with ramps connecting several different rooms. Then he built another and another, hopping between patrons that supported his research, and framing his work in terms of population: How many individuals could a rodent city hold without losing its collective mind? By 1954, he was working under the auspices of the National Institute of Mental Health, which gave him whole rooms to build his rodentopias. Some of these featured rats, while others focused on mice instead. Like a rodent real estate developer, he incorporated ever-better amenities: climbable walls, food hoppers that could serve two dozen customers at once, lodging he described as “walk-up one-room apartments.” Video records of his experiments show Calhoun with a pleased smile and a pipe in his mouth, color-coded mice scurrying over his boots.

Still, at a certain point, each of these paradises collapsed. “There could be no escape from the behavioral consequences of rising population density,” Calhoun wrote in an early paper. Even Universe 25—the biggest, best mousetopia of all, built after a quarter century of research—failed to break this pattern. In late October, the first litter of mouse pups was born. After that, the population doubled every two months—20 mice, then 40, then 80. The babies grew up and had babies of their own. Families became dynasties, carving out and holding down the best in-cage real estate. By August of 1969, the population numbered 620.

Then, as always, things took a turn. Such rapid growth put too much pressure on the mouse way of life. As new generations reached adulthood, many couldn’t find mates, or places in the social order—the mouse equivalent of a spouse and a job. Spinster females retreated to high-up nesting boxes, where they lived alone, far from the family neighborhoods. Washed-up males gathered in the center of the Universe, near the food, where they fretted, languished, and attacked each other. Meanwhile, overextended mouse moms and dads began moving nests constantly to avoid their unsavory neighbors. They also took their stress out on their babies, kicking them out of the nest too early, or even losing them during moves.

Population growth slowed way down again. Most of the adolescent mice retreated even further from societal expectations, spending all their time eating, drinking, sleeping and grooming, and refusing to fight or to even attempt to mate. (These individuals were forever changed—when Calhoun’s colleague attempted to transplant some of them to more normal situations, they didn’t remember how to do anything.) In May of 1970, just under 2 years into the study, the last baby was born, and the population entered a swan dive of perpetual senescence. It’s unclear exactly when the last resident of Universe 25 perished, but it was probably sometime in 1973.

Paradise couldn’t even last half a decade.

In 1973, Calhoun published his Universe 25 research as “Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population.” It is, to put it lightly, an intense academic reading experience. He quotes liberally from the Book of Revelation, italicizing certain words for emphasis (e.g. “to kill with the sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts”). He gave his claimed discoveries catchy names—the mice who forgot how to mate were “the beautiful ones”’ rats who crowded around water bottles were “social drinkers”; the overall societal breakdown was the “behavioral sink.” In other words, it was exactly the kind of diction you’d expect from someone who spent his entire life perfecting the art of the mouse dystopia.

Most frightening are the parallels he draws between rodent and human society. “I shall largely speak of mice,” he begins, “but my thoughts are on man.” Both species, he explains, are vulnerable to two types of death—that of the spirit and that of the body. Even though he had removed physical threats, doing so had forced the residents of Universe 25 into a spiritually unhealthy situation, full of crowding, overstimulation, and contact with various mouse strangers. To a society experiencing the rapid growth of cities—and reacting, in various ways, quite poorly—this story seemed familiar. Senators brought it up in meetings. It showed up in science fiction and comic books. Even Tom Wolfe, never lost for description, used Calhounian terms to describe New York City, calling all of Gotham a “behavioral sink.”
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Convinced that he had found a real problem, Calhoun quickly began using his mouse models to try and fix it. If mice and humans weren’t afforded enough physical space, he thought, perhaps they could make up for it with conceptual space—creativity, artistry, and the type of community not built around social hierarchies. His later Universes were designed to be spiritually as well as physically utopic, with rodent interactions carefully controlled to maximize happiness (he was particularly fascinated by some early rats who had created an innovative form of tunneling, where they rolled dirt into balls). He extrapolated this, too, to human concerns, becoming an early supporter of environmental design and H.G. Wells’s hypothetical “World Brain,” an international information network that was a clear precursor to the internet.

But the public held on hard to his earlier work—as Ramsden and Adams put it, “everyone want[ed] to hear the diagnosis, no one want[ed] to hear the cure.” Gradually, Calhoun lost attention, standing, and funding. In 1986, he was forced to retire from the National Institute of Mental Health. Nine years later, he died.

But there was one person who paid attention to his more optimistic experiments, a writer named Robert C. O’Brien. In the late ’60s, O’Brien allegedly visited Calhoun’s lab, met the man trying to build a true and creative rodent paradise, and took note of the Frisbee on the door, the scientists’ own attempt “to help when things got too stressful,” as Calhoun put it. Soon after, O’Brien wrote Ms. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH—a story about rats who, having escaped from a lab full of blundering humans, attempt to build their own utopia. Next time, maybe we should put the rats in charge.

[masraum]

Interesting. What it sounds like to me is that we don't need a utopia. We need struggle and hardship.

[Crowbob]

In nature, populations are self-limiting. The food and space runs out and the population declines. For humans, increasingly divorced from nature, food and space are artificially sustained so the population also is sustained and so grows.

However, with the introduction and proliferation of the internets, humans are beginning to be exposed to ‘virtual crowding’ and ‘virtual hunger’. Nowdays, someone who lives, say, in Iowa is no longer insulated, by virtue of blissful ignorance, from the real world and the crowding and squalor of India, or China, and even parts of San Francisco or Detroit. So even though the Iowan lives in a spacious lack of want, he is, nevertheless, quite conscious of, and increasingly exposed to, the misery and hellish existence of enormous populations in other places.

As such, by extension, the entire world has been reduced to a Universe 25 so that even if particular individuals’ real existences are quite comfortable, their knowledge of the real world plays heavily on their psyches. The consequence is the proliferation of humans (with that proliferation being sustained unnaturally) behaving in negative ways inconsistent with their own realities. Great societies, though living in relative comfort, begin to decline.

[legion]

Originally Posted by masraum

Interesting. What it sounds like to me is that we don't need a utopia. We need struggle and hardship.

This is true to some degree, but taken to its extreme it makes the Kims, Mao, and Stalin look benevolent.

[Sooner or later]

Thanks for posting. An interesting read. A picture of his rodentopia Universe 25

[onewhippedpuppy]

That’s a really interesting read, and I certainly see the parallels to modern human society.

[fanaudical]

Interesting article - thanks for sharing.

I'm going to go hide far away from other humans now...

[Sooner or later]

Originally Posted by fanaudical

I'm going to go hide far away from other humans now...

And spend all your time eating, drinking, sleeping and grooming, and refusing to fight or to even attempt to mate.

[herr_oberst]

Originally Posted by fanaudical

Interesting article - thanks for sharing.

I'm going to go hide far away from other humans now...

Good stuff. Thanks for the post.

[john70t]

Water and electricity always seek the easiest path.

This can be changed.

[Tobra]

Originally Posted by fanaudical

Interesting article - thanks for sharing.

I'm going to go hide far away from other humans now...

Ironic, this is the society we have wrought

Animals want purpose. The more complex the critter, the stronger the drive for this

[DanielDudley]

An interesting study that shows what can happen to those without purpose. What it fails to document is that staying busy can bring its own problems. At some point it may come down to having a higher purpose or noble undertaking that ultimately makes or breaks us.

In the end we are all stuck in the same box, and although it is big, it is also finite. Having family values, and winning the rat race by being the biggest rat is all well and good, but in the end it doesn't really differentiate us from the rats. From what I see, this box isn't getting any bigger.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by DanielDudley

An interesting study that shows what can happen to those without purpose.

For sure. It took a good year for me to adjust to just having a different purpose after I sold my business. I feel sorry for those who don't have a drive to do something outside of themselves.

[fanaudical]

I agree purpose is importznt but I have also met many who have "purpose" but no "focus". They seem just as lost as those without purpose.

[epbrown]

Originally Posted by masraum

Interesting. What it sounds like to me is that we don't need a utopia. We need struggle and hardship.

Agent Smith told us that in The Matrix, remember?

[brainz01]

Thought provoking post. Thank you for sharing the article.

[RWebb]

In nature, populations are usually NOT self-limiting. predators, parasites, etc. are the usual limits

[LEAKYSEALS951]

This reminds me of a trip to NYC.
Specifically, shopping in Macy's during the holiday season.

[legion]

Originally Posted by epbrown

Agent Smith told us that in The Matrix, remember?