Initially, the population grew rapidly, doubling every 55 days. After he published an extremely popular article in Scientific American in 1962 describing the first phase of Mouse Utopia experiments, it became a stock example employed by liberals in application to human populations, particularly for global & urban population growth and any human problem that might be caused by environments, such as the urban decay and riots and spiking crime rates of that era.Īs WP puts it, describing the most famous Mouse Utopia (not to be confused with the also-dubious & also-highly-popular Rat Park experiment), Universe 25: Mouse Utopia is interpreted as illustrating the damaging effects of the environment & overcrowding by John B. Calhoun’s behavioral sink “Mouse Utopia” experiments? Mouse Utopia is a legendary experiment in which mice were put in a high-density enclosure (“Universe 25”) with unlimited food, a ‘mouse utopia’-only to see the initial population growth be followed by a population collapse generations later, while the late mouse population exhibited bizarre physical & social abnormalities such as autistic-like behavior & homosexuality & failure to reproduce. Looking more closely into it, there are reasons to doubt the replicability of the growth & pathological behavior & collapse of this utopia (“no-place”), and if it does happen, whether it is driven by the social pressures as claimed by Calhoun or by other causal mechanisms at least as consistent with the evidence like disease or mutational meltdown. In the usual telling, Mouse Utopia created ideal mouse environments in which the mouse population was permitted to increase as much as possible however, the overcrowding inevitably resulted in extreme levels of physical & social dysfunctionality, and eventually population collapse & even extinction.
One of the most famous experiments in psychology & sociology was John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiments in the 1960s–1970s. Did John Calhoun’s 1960s Mouse Utopia really show that animal (and human) populations will expand to arbitrary densities, creating socially-driven pathology and collapse? I give reasons for doubt about its replicability, interpretation, and meaningfulness.
0 kommentar(er)
