What would happen if you gave rodents the perfect enclosure? All the food, water, clean bedding they could want with no predators or other dangers. Common sense would suggest the little beast would breed themselves until they filled every possible space within their sheltering walls.
A mid-20th Century ethologist (one that studies animal behavior in their natural environment) tried to find out by constructing nearly perfect worlds for mice and rats, only to find that each experiment would end in about two years when the captive population petered out and died. Perhaps John B. Calhoun’s most famous experiment was Universe 25, where with National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), he constructed what should have been the perfect artificial world for mice.
Calhoun described the eventual collapse as “behavioral sink” that was caused by overcrowding. Experts today are reinterpreting his work and declaring that it wasn’t overcrowding but the unfair distribution of space within the enclosure (because what problem today can’t be solved by socialist redistribution). Here
SOYLENT GREEN IS MOUSE CRAP!!!!!
Evidently he didn’t know that the mice actually controlled the Universe according to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
No news here. The Pilgrims learned that hundreds of years ago. If only the mice of the GOPe learned it now. (They won’t – abandon them.)
They should have gotten advice from Democrats. They have a rats nest that thrives.
Sounds much like the democrat inner cities all across our Nation.
Housing, food, medical and all sustenance are provided and no work required. However, they keep preening, breeding and killing each other.
The big difference is the inner city shitholes filled with these dependent social orders (losers, abusers and users) continue to breed to receive more government assistance, thrive as predators and don’t die out.
LBJ referred to it as “The Great Society”.
This is why you don’t feed the bears at Yellowstone.
Does High Density Housing and Welfare ring a bell?
This kind of explains Soy-Boy’s, no?
It isn’t happening in China and India.
Interesting video but they left out the fact that it all started to fall apart when the doctor introduced brown and black mice and artificially sustained these minority populations with direct feedings.
The mice had nothing to do in Universe 25 – no need to work for food or shelter, there were no predators or dangers, and everything was given to them. All they had to do was merely exist, and even for mice that wasn’t enough.
Ah, but that can’t happen to humans because we are too evolved. On the other hand, maybe our urban ghettos are our own Universe 25s. The black community has about a 75% illegitimacy rate. Abortion rates in the black community are high. Black men avoid marriage, and we have even gone so far as to add the term “baby daddy” to our language to describe women with multiple children by multiple absent fathers. Crime is high, gang membership is high, drug use is rampant, and sneakers cost $200 a pair.
Nationwide, our TFR numbers are dropping, and in many parts of the world, including socialized Europe, the birth rate is below replacement value. Our “leaders” are advocating perversions as a desireable lifestyle. Marriage rates are down. Our new billionaires are tech geeks who, when boiled down to its simplist form, own companies that produce virtually nothing other than ways for people to avoid actual physical interaction with other people and electronically broadcast to the world what they had for lunch. Our government discourages success, and scoffs at industriousness.
Universe 25 was designed to give the mice everything they physically needed. Perhaps the lesson is that while that is life, it is not living.
As a former Psych lab Grad Assistant I was always fascinated with how fast a rat or a muse would eat others of its own kind. Once it started it would not stop – but there were others who never would even when food deprived.
Learned a lot about behavior in that lab (got the cute chicks too).