Is This Why You’re all Trans?
Eight mice were placed in a utopia. Full of food, water, bedding, and space for 3000 mice. Within three years there were no survivors. They had no enemies, were not overcrowded and didn’t have to work for their food or accommodation. What happened? Their societal rules began to break down, they became hypersexual, violent and stopped breeding. Many became gay; males gave up trying to find mates and concentrated of grooming and looking pretty.
Dr. Calhoun was a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). In his most famous experiment, four breeding pairs of mice were moved into a mouse utopia. There were unlimited supplies of food, water and bedding. The area was disease free, the temperature perfectly controlled, and the researchers even cleaned the place monthly. As close to heaven as a mouse could get. All that they lacked was infinite space. There was, however, room for 3,000 mice.
Mice, for those who are unaware, are actually quite social creatures in the right conditions. They take on group roles, mark out territories, and develop hierarchies if their environment allows. It is this behaviour that Calhoun wished to affect, and study. He described the experiment in terms of four “eras”, summarized here.
Days 0-100: The era called “Strive”. During which the mice were getting used to the new world, territories were established.
Days 100-315: The “Exploit” period. The population doubled every 60 or so days. Normal social behaviour was noted here, and the population took full advantage of its unlimited resources.
Days 315-600: The “Equilibrium” period. It was here that the social roles of mice began to break down. Mice born during this period found they lacked space to mark out territories in, and random acts of violence among the mice began to occur. Many males simply gave up on trying to find females. These males retreated into their bedding and rarely ventured out. Simply eating, sleeping, and grooming. Calhoun dubbed these narcissistic loners “The Beautiful Ones”. They also tended to be rather stupid.
Days 600-800: The “Die” phase. The population, which maxed-out at 2,200, began to decline, not even reaching the 3,000 ceiling which the experiment had been designed to accommodate. . No surviving births took place after day 600, and the colony ultimately died out. Individuals removed from the colony and placed in similar units continued to demonstrate erratic behaviour and also failed to reproduce. The mice were remarkably violent at this time, for little reason.
The work eventually proved controversial for a few reasons: first, the behaviour of mice cannot be used independently to understand the behaviour of humans; second, when scientists tried to study the behavioural sink theory in humans, they had to decide which human behaviours they would consider similar to the unusual behaviour of the mice. For instance, some mice exhibited different sexual behaviours ranging from asexuality to bisexuality.
Calhoun found the males to be hypersexual, sexually deviant and hyperactive in an overpopulated environment. The sexual deviancy exhibited itself in the form of homosexuality. Homosexuality is not uncommon in normal animal populations; however, Calhoun found this behaviour in excess of what he had expected. Most of the homosexuals seemed unable to distinguish a sex object and would attack males, females, and juveniles. The males also exhibited a frenetic over-·activity level.
Other scientists have repeated Cahoun’s experiment with similar results. They’ve also used rats instead of mice. “The results of this pilot study were similar to those found by Calhoun (1962). The lack of maternal care combined with inefficient nest construction and poor defence resulted in a high mortality rate among the second litter (71%), while the mortality rate for the first litter was only two percent. The young that died were eaten by the adults. Nest building by the females was abandoned entirely with the second litter. Retrieving and transporting of the young by the females also ceased by the second litter. Homosexuality increased greatly among the males after the second litter.”
Although the initial experiment was about overcrowding, the experiment never reached the overcrowding phase. The results though were entirely surprising. Utopia was found in all these experiments not to work. The mice had been provided with everything, food, drink and shelter. They didn’t have to strive for anything. Once they’d set themselves up, there was nothing to do, and that’s when everything broke down. People will note parallels in today’s society in western Europe.
Full story:
https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2428&context=open_access_etds
https://borgenproject.org/theory-behavioral-sink/
https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-rats-turned-their-private-paradise-into-a-terrifyin-1687584457
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/why-overpopulation-is-more-than-just-a-material-problem
