Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Universe 25 (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey everyone, I don't know if you can hear it by the sound of my voice, but I got back from New York and I'm really sick. Somewhere between the airport and the subway and the conference I attended, I got a bug and I feel absolutely horrible. So while I did not intend to do another encore episode, the moment I got back, I was kind of forced to do it today. So, enjoyed this encore episode on Universe 25, the Utopia for Mice that went horribly wrong. And hopefully tomorrow, I'll have a fresh episode for you. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to create a utopia? A place where all your wants and needs were taken care of and there was never any fear of harm. Creating such a world for humans may be far off, but one man did try to create a utopia for rats.

Starting point is 00:00:46 He created a world that had everything they would ever want and where all their needs were taken care of. But it didn't turn out like anyone expected. Learn more about Universe 25 and how a utopia turned into a dystopia on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR.

Starting point is 00:01:36 If you take a strict definition of the scientific method, you first create a hypothesis and then you conduct an experiment to test the hypothesis. While it's great when science works this way, often the most interesting results will come when someone just says, let's try this out and see what will happen. This was the impetus behind the study, which was the subject of this episode. An ethnologist by the name of John B. Calhoun, who worked at the National Institute of Health, devised a study in 1958 that would take place on Norwegian rats. In a barn in rural Maryland, he created what he figured would be a rat paradise. In this rat utopia, there would be no shortage of food or water. There would be no predators. Plus, there would be plenty of space for the rats to live and build nests. The area for

Starting point is 00:02:23 the rats was divided into four parts that were three meters by four point three meters by two point seven meters in height. There was a hallway around the structure and all of the rooms had glass ceiling so the researchers could see what was happening. He ran these experiments for a total of four years before having to cease the experiments to take a sabbatical at Stanford. He wrote up his findings for Scientific American, and the results became famous in several communities. But more on the results in a bit. In 1968, he once again went back to the Rat Utopia Blackboard, and at this time he ran the 25th version of the experiment, hence the name Universe 25. This setup was a bit different. For starters, he used mice instead of rats, and he created some vertical tunnels for the mice to access

Starting point is 00:03:04 nesting areas, but other than that, the mice would have had everything they needed just like the other experiments. The only real limit on the mice was space. There was a finite amount of space, but he estimated that Universe 25 could hold 3,840 mice. The experiment started with eight mice, four males and four females. They were put into Universe 25 and allowed to be the best mice that they could be. At first, everything went great. The mice spent a lot of time eating, running around, and reproducing. The time it took to double the population of mice was approximately 55 days.

Starting point is 00:03:39 The mice slowly began taking up all the space that was available. and the mouse population kept doubling at the rate of 55 days for several months. However, when the population hit about 620 on day 315, something happened. The mouse society began to change. Starting with day 315, the time it took for the mouse population to double rose to 145 days, up from 55. For about the next 330 days, the mouse society in Universe 25 began to break down and the behavior of the mice changed radically.

Starting point is 00:04:12 Baby mice were often kicked out by the mother before they were finished weaning. Young mice were often attacked. Dominant males would often start fights for no apparent reason, and they became extremely violent, and they would often resort to cannibalism. Females became aggressive with other females. Non-dominant males basically just gave up and wouldn't fight back when they were attacked. Eventually, the new mice were born into this system, and they didn't know anything else. On day 560, population growth basically halted.

Starting point is 00:04:40 The mouse population hit 2,200 mice, which was well below the number of mice that the universe could theoretically hold. This began what became known as the death phase. On day 600, the last mouse was born. Reproduction among the mice totally stopped. None of the mice, male or female, were interested in reproducing. One group of mice separated themselves, and they were dubbed the beautiful ones by the researchers. They did nothing social. They didn't reproduce.

Starting point is 00:05:07 They didn't mark territory. They didn't fight. They didn't do anything. They engaged in no social activity whatsoever. All they did was eat, sleep, and groom themselves. The mice at this point had no clue how normal mice behaved. They never grew up in that world. Eventually, the entire population of Universe 25 became extinct, and it wasn't from a lack of food, water, or even space. There was plenty of space, especially towards the end as the population was nearing zero. What Calhoun found in Universe 25 was basically the same thing that he found in the other previous 24 universes. The population would

Starting point is 00:05:42 grow rapidly. At a certain point, the mice or rats would engage in antisocial behavior, and the social order would collapse. All the mice would shift to solitary activities, reproduction would plummet, and eventually the population would go extinct. Calhoun dubbed this change a behavioral sink. The big question on everyone's mind was, what did the results mean? One problem is that everyone seemed to read into the experiment whatever they wanted to. There have been different interpretations of what the results meant. The first and most obviously direct interpretation was that the change in behavior was due to overcrowding and overpopulation. This is certainly a plausible hypothesis. However, the population didn't come close to its maximum capacity. And given the

Starting point is 00:06:23 parameters of the experiment, there were never a shortage of resources. Another explanation has to do with social roles. There are only so many social roles that can be filled in a mouse society. When mice fall outside of these roles, such as being a dominant male, in nature they would just go off somewhere else and perhaps find a different mate. In Universe 25, there was nowhere to go. This caused social problems to be inserted into the mouse society that otherwise would never exist in nature. Yet another theory is that there was too much socialization. Laboratory rats raised in isolation can often have stunted development. However, perhaps there are problems that can be at the other end of socialization as well.

Starting point is 00:07:01 Those were just the theories to explain what happened to the rats and the mice. Everyone then had theories for what it meant for humanity. In the 1960s, some felt that the overpopulation and dense crowding in cities like New York had led to a general sense of apathy. This, it was claimed, was reflected in the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, which was reportedly witnessed or heard by 38 people, none of whom came to her aid or called for help. The experiment was used to explain the breakdown of the family,

Starting point is 00:07:29 Female mice on willing to care for their young and violent males were compared to what was happening in people. Movies like Soylent Green were analogous to what some people thought was happening in Calhoun's rat universes. And recently, some people have been making connections between the experiment and how people react on social media. They compare the behavior of subgroups of people on the internet to how some of the mice behaved when they suffered from too much socialization. However, many of these opinions were just that. Opinions. They weren't backed up by any actual data. they were just ideas that people were spitballing. For obvious reasons, it would be difficult to replicate a study like this with humans. It would take decades to carry out, not even to consider the ethical

Starting point is 00:08:09 issues of keeping someone locked up for that much time. However, some limited studies on humans have been done. There were some sociological tests done on people with limited extreme crowding, but they didn't get the results anything like what Calhoun found for rats and mice. Eventually, researchers began to offer more technical critiques of Calhoun's experiment. For starters, they noted that the utopia he built was really just a prison. The mice did have everything they wanted except for space, and that isn't much different than humans in a prison who are fed. Mice in the wild would never live their entire lives in confines so small. As with prison, it allows for the most aggressive mice to control everything, which eventually leads to

Starting point is 00:08:48 the breakdown of the whole society. Over the years, the interpretation of Calhoun's experiment has changed to reflect whatever the current issue of the day is. Ultimately, humans are not rats or mice, especially when it comes to socialization. Humans have long memories and can reason our way out of situations that rodents can't. Nonetheless, the rodent experiments of John B. Calhoun have been the inspiration for several fictional works, including Judge Dredd and Mrs. Frisbee and the rats of Nym. Calhoun's Rattopia experiment was odd in that, at least scientifically, it really wasn't useful to explain much of anything. It was a fascinating study, but people are still arguing about its implications and why it went the way it did. However, as a metaphor and a cultural touchstone,

Starting point is 00:09:32 the experiment was a huge success. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer. I wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who supports the show on Patreon. Your support helps me put out a new show every day. And if you're interested in Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise, Patreon is currently the only place where it's available. And if you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and get notified to future episodes and projects, please join my Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Universe 25 (Encore)

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