![]() ![]() This essay examines the influence of Calhouns experiments. The resulting population explosion was followed by a series of 'social pathologies'-violence, sexual deviance, and withdrawal. ![]() Calhoun offered rats everything they needed, except space. If it's possible, I think a control setup should be added, where the rats in the control "universe" would have to engage in activities like their natural behavior to get food. In a series of experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health, the animal ecologist John B. ![]() I'd like to see a modern recreation of it, along with better statistical representation of the data and the changes over time. Is that abnormal? Some rats kill their young and the infant mortality rate rises as population density does. They all eat together - is that abnormal? Some of the rats and lazy, and live by themselves. They are given unlimited access to food and water - but, aren't all pets and lab animals given all the food and water they want? What's special about these?Īnother problem is that Calhoun does a lot of evaluating rat behavior. One problem that stood out to me is how the mice in Calhoun's experiment are any different than any other kind of laboratory or pet mice. The study finds a conclusion that is directly applicable to the issue of the day (overpopulation and overcrowding in Calhoun's time) and has an interesting metaphorical attention getting alarm to it ("We humans are the rats!"). It seems to have the character of a lot of the "Failed to replicate" studies in psychology and sociology. After about 55 days, the population doubled as the rats filled the most desirable space in the pen, where access to the food tunnel was easy.I'd like to see a replication of the Mouse Utopia experiment. The experiment began, and as you might expect, the rats used a time that was usually wasted for food and shelter for excessive sexual intercourse. It’s not often that anything is described as a “utopia,” but there were also lions that were picking us up one by one. The rats were selected for their health, obtained from the National Institutes of Health, and extreme care was taken to prevent any disease in the universe.Īs well as this, no predator was present in the utopia, as its causes stand. The weather was kept at 68☏ (20☌), which is the temperature of the mouse among those of you who are not rats. They can access unlimited food through 16 food hoppers accessed through the tunnel, which can feed 25 rats together and a bottle of water just above. The environment was created to eliminate problems that could lead to wildlife deaths. In this study, he took four breeding rats and placed them inside a “utopia”. The most infamous of the experiments was named, quite dramatically, the Universe 25. Calhoun developed a series of experiments that basically met every need of rats and then tracked the effects of time on the population. The answer – according to his study – was soon cannibalism followed by an apocalypse. As it happens, advances in agriculture, changes in agriculture and new agricultural technologies have given us enough food to feed 10 billion people and how food has been distributed in a way that has caused widespread famine and starvation.Īs we use our resources and the climate crisis gets worse, things can change – but for now, we’ve always been able to produce more food than we need, even if we don’t have the will or ability to deliver it. Some – the Malthusians – even took the view that as soon as the resources ran out, the population would “control” itself through the death of the population until a sustainable population came. Although he started the scientific inquiry in a rural place, he later got his own lab where he reportedly built the observation inside a barn. During this time, concerns have been raised that our numbers could increase our ability to produce food, leading to widespread famine. HOW BIG WAS UNIVERSE 25 IN CALHOUN’S EXPERIMENT The Universe 25 was the biggest of John Calhoun’s compartmentalized rat utopia experiments. The world’s human population has grown over the last few hundred years, from our estimate of one billion in 1804 to seven billion in 2017. ![]()
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