JimBowie1958
Old Fogey
- Sep 25, 2011
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I am skeptical about how many parralels there are between mice and men, but I suspect that there are some.
While I work on the assumption that all mankind is capable of reason and behaving rationally, I cant help wondering if maybe there could be some deeper psychological needs that vary from ethnicity to ethnicity that have other more subtle demands as well.
Doess anyone else have anything they might share?
The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the āRats of NIMHā - Atlas Obscura - Pocket
While I work on the assumption that all mankind is capable of reason and behaving rationally, I cant help wondering if maybe there could be some deeper psychological needs that vary from ethnicity to ethnicity that have other more subtle demands as well.
Doess anyone else have anything they might share?
The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the āRats of NIMHā - Atlas Obscura - Pocket
On July 9th, 1968, eight white mice were placed into a strange box at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Maybe āboxā isnāt 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 instituteās 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 mouseās lifeāno cats, no traps, no long winters. Itās even better than your average lab mouseās, 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 couldnāt 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, āEscaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence,ā 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 cityās chief pests....
In 1947, to keep a close eye on his charges, Calhoun constructed a quarter-acre ārat cityā 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 Calhounāif 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 metropolisāthis 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 āwalk-up one-room apartments.ā 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. āThere could be no escape from the behavioral consequences of rising population density,ā Calhoun wrote in an early paper. Even Universe 25āthe biggest, best mousetopia of all, built after a quarter century of researchāfailed to break this pattern. In late October, the first litter of mouse pups was born. After that, the population doubled every two monthsā20 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 couldnāt find mates, or places in the social orderāthe 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 changedāwhen Calhounās colleague attempted to transplant some of them to more normal situations, they didnāt 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. Itās unclear exactly when the last resident of Universe 25 perished, but it was probably sometime in 1973.
Paradise couldnāt even last half a decade.
I am wondering if virtual worlds might provide the mental freedom, room for creativity and a sense of purpose and relevance to people to combat this societal collapse in the hearts and minds of mankind. Of course the old traditional values we have evolved over thousands and millions of years would provide the ultimate foundation, but maybe it can make up in some small degree what Reality lacks in an increasingly over populated human society?This is a far cry from a wild mouseās lifeāno cats, no traps, no long winters. Itās even better than your average lab mouseās, 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 couldnāt 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, āEscaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence,ā 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 cityās chief pests....
In 1947, to keep a close eye on his charges, Calhoun constructed a quarter-acre ārat cityā 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 Calhounāif 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 metropolisāthis 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 āwalk-up one-room apartments.ā 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. āThere could be no escape from the behavioral consequences of rising population density,ā Calhoun wrote in an early paper. Even Universe 25āthe biggest, best mousetopia of all, built after a quarter century of researchāfailed to break this pattern. In late October, the first litter of mouse pups was born. After that, the population doubled every two monthsā20 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 couldnāt find mates, or places in the social orderāthe 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 changedāwhen Calhounās colleague attempted to transplant some of them to more normal situations, they didnāt 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. Itās unclear exactly when the last resident of Universe 25 perished, but it was probably sometime in 1973.
Paradise couldnāt even last half a decade.
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